American Bred Episode 12: And She Lived
by American Companion
Summary: Katie is taken, and the Final Stage is set. The Doctor may be on time, but with the Scorch Project so well planned-and the motives so justified-should he really contest the Rahki's choices?
1. Chapter 1

Julius stared at the Doctor without fear. "The only hope you have of preventing this and saving her is to stay away. If you go anywhere near her, especially now, you will both end up dead. The known universe will end, and that can only be stopped if you stay away." His hands were open, relinquishing any authority. "I can't stop you, so I won't try. You can do one or the other; stay away from her and let her live, or chase her and watch everything you once held dear crumble." He looked the Doctor in the eye. "Choose wisely."

The Doctor stared back at the Krize general, breathing deeply. All manner of thoughts ran through his mind, all the information he had collected in the previous months. What Katie could be, what she had done, what would likely happen if he did follow. It all added up to certain heartbreak, and probably death and destruction.

But then, didn't everything he did?

"I made her a promise Karzon," the Doctor said tightly. "One that I've broken once already. She begged me to find her, and she shouldn't have to do that."

He pressed several buttons on the vortex manipulator and vanished, following the signal from the stolen TARDIS coming from the Rahki ship.

Julius sighed. One of his soldiers came to stand next to him.

"Do we still follow sir?"

"No. We head home."

The soldier seemed appalled. "Sir, the Doctor went after Scorch; the Project will close the hour he gets caught."

"I know."

"It's hopeless already?" the soldier said, more as a statement than a question.

Julius ignored the bluntness of the sentence. The Krize military was very young; they were still figuring it out, including building the habit of respecting rank. No matter; after today they wouldn't need an army again. Even if it all went wrong.

"No. We've been running interference for a very long time, and it got us what was needed."

"Sir?"

"We sent the Grixzen after her while she was still human to force her off Earth early so that she'd be more open to him. We came here today to keep them from being taken together. If they had, it would most certainly be hopeless."

"You knew he would follow Scorch."

"I did. She's a killer, and he's the most dangerous person this universe holds. The perfect set of friends. Woe to any who try to hurt one, because the other will seek vengeance. But they've got to have the chance first."

* * *

Katie sat up with a deep gasp, drawing in air like a drowning woman as she rolled onto her hands and knees. She started choking on air, dimly aware of a lot of whiteness and someone nearby.

"It's okay, just breath slowly," a female voice said. Katie felt someone touch her back, moving their hands up and down it. "Match your breathing to my hands."

Katie did as she was told, her head feeling incredibly foggy. A loud buzzing kept up a steady drone, like there was a bee stuck in her ear. No, like there was an entire hive flying around her body.

"Oh, just let her alone," a wiry male voice said. "She'll come around like the rest of us did."

"Be quiet 24," the female voice said again. "We look after our own."

"Oh please 25," the wiry voice—24?—mocked, his tone clearly showing his rolling eyes. "She's not from our series. We're going to be incinerated, and she's one of the first newbies."

"I'm glad of it," a stronger male voice said. "I'm tired of waking up with half formed memories. At least the headaches will stop, and we can all drop the charade."

"Wouldn't you rather live?" the female—25—asked. The buzzing in Katie's head was dying down, which she was very thankful for. Just the small conversation had given her several questions, the first being where she was.

"Of course I'd rather live," the second man said. "But that's not likely to happen."

"You can let yourself be led to the slaughter if you want 23," 25 snapped. "I'm going to be looking for a way out right up until the second I die. Are you feeling better?"

This question obviously being directed at Katie, she nodded. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm good, thanks." Sitting up, Katie set her back against a glass wall, looking up at the woman who had helped her. Katie blinked in surprise.

"You're…" The woman smiled.

"Yes, we all look this way."

23 moved so that Katie could see the large room better. It was blazingly white, making it reek of the sterile and laboratory. Glistening partitions made of glass were set up everywhere, looking to have no real purpose other than to create small three sided rooms. None of that interested Katie though. All around, there were people, about a hundred of them, all copies of the same man and woman. There were a few slight variations from one to the next, but essentially they were all the same: deep red hair, dark green eyes, moderate skin, and freckle-like spots running down from their temples to disappear into their collars.

Katie couldn't hold back her gasp as she realized what they were. "You're all Jahra!"

The man with the wiry voice spoke up. "What was your first clue?" he asked sarcastically. Katie looked at 24, noticing his body build matched his voice. The female, 25, blinked, giving her an odd look.

"Of course we're Jahra. What else would we be?"

Katie stared at her, a face scarily similar to her own. "Ah…I'm…I'm not sure. Probably still dizzy or something. Um, where are we?"

"The holding bay, currently occupied by the Epsilon-200 series," the stronger man—Katie thought he must be 23—said. His voice matched him as well, Katie noticed before he continued. "This is where we sit when they bring us back. We all just returned from the Memory Transfers."

"Is that where they take all your memories and stick them in a computer?"

24 gave her an incredulous look. "Of course it is. You should know this."

Katie smiled. "Right, sorry."

"Where are your specks?" 23 asked.

"My what?" Katie asked.

"Your specks," 25 said, pointing to the spots on her own face. "You don't have any."

"None of my series did," Katie said truthfully.

"Odd, but not really surprising," the woman answered with a nod. "They keep breeding us to look less and less like them."

"The Rahki," Katie said, keeping the question from her voice. 24 seemed to hear it anyway.

"Of course the Rahki are the ones breeding us," he said in disgusted disbelief. "You are so thick."

"Be polite for once 24," 25 said. "She's obviously from a servant batch. They've caught Sparky; no need to download all that knowledge anymore like they did for the rest of us."

"You seem awfully calm about it," 24 said sullenly.

23 scoffed. "Please 24, we have this same conversation every time our series is brought back. You whine about how it's not fair. You knew this was going to happen the first day we were turned out. We get programmed, we live people's lives, get brought back to have our memories drained, and once we're worn out or get too outdated we get incinerated. It's part of life."

"At least I'm not just sitting and waiting for them to take me like you are, or repeating the same empty hope over and over again like 25 does."

"I do not!" the young female protested. 24 rolled his eyes, and 23 gave a grudging nod.

"You do 25. Every time, always talking about earning a life for yourself. It's not going to happen."

"Empty hope is better than none," Katie quietly said, purposefully drawing attention back to her. The three looked at her.

"For some," 24 said bitterly.

"So…who's Sparky?" Katie said, knowing full well who it was. 25's face lit up and the other two groaned.

"Sparky is what all the normal Jahra Rahki call her. She's got a designation like the rest of us, but she's got a real name too."

"What's her designation?"

"Experiment He-Zayin-Aleph."

"That's not Greek," Katie said, surprised. 25 shook her head.

"No, it's Phoenician for E-F-A. They even used a separate set of letters for her project!"

24 heaved a great sigh. "Yes, yes we know. She's so amazingly special, and they worked on her design for millennia, and she got a real life on a planet with a family, and won't know she's one of us until she has her base layer activated, and even once she's brought back she won't have her memories removed. But it isn't so amazing for her the whole way, now is it?"

"It'd be worth it!"

"Please 25, would you really want to spend the last years of your life unable to touch anyone? And then have it all drained from you for what seems to be the end of the universe or something equally dastardly?"

"Oh, good word!" Katie said, nodding. "What's this about getting your own life?"

"Something went wrong with Sparky," 23 said with a bit of a smile. "She left Sol 3 too early, and her tracking device was damaged. We all got a laugh out of that; the Rahki make a Jahra with her own mind and she goes missing."

"Still found her though," 24 said in an irritated manner. "They always do. All the Jahra who found out something about her, anything about a piece of her timeline were given their own lives. Set free. At least that's what they say."

"Why would the Rahki lie?" Katie asked innocently. All three stared at her. Even 25 seemed a bit surprised Katie would ask such a thing.

"We're nothing to them," 23 said. "Recorders, that's all. They don't have a good reason to keep us around, even if we did bring back something so important."

"What about that one from Delta-0 series?" 25 insisted. "What was he, number 009 or something?"

"He brought back a TARDIS Key." 24 gave her a look. "It was even _his_ personal key. Little hard to beat that."

Katie's hand instantly flashed to her neck. She'd forgotten about the TARDIS Key. She ran her hand frantically around her neck, knowing that it was useless to search. The Rahki had taken her Key. She noticed for the first time that she was wearing something similar to hospital scrubs like every other Jahra. She leaned back in shock, the fact that she still had the necklace the Doctor had given her small comfort.

"Shit," Katie said, forgetting to restrain herself. "Shit. They've already run me through. Brilliant." She crossed her arms, tapping her nose and clicking her teeth in puzzlement. "But why stick me here? What good does that do them?"

Ignoring the looks 23, 24, and 25 were giving her she stood up, she started pacing back and forth, one hand rubbing the necklace as she muttered under her breath.

"Transported here, obviously given an electric shock to overload my cells and knock me out. Run me through the full examination, check the energy levels, and then…what? Plunk me in one of the generic waiting rooms? It'd make more sense to just hook me up to something and start the siphon, take a couple cell samples to start cloning and soldier breeding. Instead I'm here." Katie clicked her teeth together, pointing at the three Jahra without looking at them.

"How did I get into this room?"

25 stuttered a little, but spoke up. "Um, you were just here when we were. We're brought in en mass, all unconscious, and we wake up about the same time. You just took a lot longer."

"Was there a blackout before I woke up?"

"A what?"

Katie sighed in irritation. "A blackout. A…a small section of time where nothing existed for several heartbeats." She waited a second before waving her hands. "Well?"

23 shook his head. "No, there wasn't. You just kept laying there and then sat up gasping like you hadn't been breathing for a long time."

Katie resumed her pacing. Nearby Jahra had also taken an interest in her sudden movements, and now nearly everyone was listening to her. "That's not so good. No wonder I hurt so much; I've got so much power zipping through me I can't even die properly. But why just drop me in here?" She froze, her eyes wide.

"Oh, of course!" she groaned. "I get snatched, the first thing the Doctor's gonna do is come chasing me. Well, maybe not him. The Krize are gonna start searching for me, but they can't find me if the only thing marking where I'm at is my Jahra DNA and my energy signature. Needle in a haystack full of needles. Lovely."

"The Doctor?"

Katie looked over at 24, his tone and look making her back up slightly. "What of it?"

"All that stuff you've been going on about…it's you, isn't it?" His voice rose slightly, carrying well in the now silent room. "It's you! You're her, the one everyone's making such a fuss over! You're Scorch!"

* * *

The Doctor reeled from the transport. Oh, how he hated the wrist worn ways of time travel!

He looked down at the now smoking manipulator. They also had a habit of burning at inconvenient times. So much better with a ship.

Speaking of which, where was TARDIS? He should have arrived right next to her. Instead he was in a plain hallway. He must have missed in his hurry. However, he could feel the engines, and the architecture was definitely Rahki. So, the general location was right; he just wasn't so good at the finer points.

Of course, now this led to the next question of which to find first; Katie or TARDIS?

Heh, TARDIS. Not _the_ TARDIS. Katie had rubbed off on him.

TARDIS wasn't a good person to leave unaccounted for. She could be used for so many different things. Gallifreyan technology in Rahki hands was not comforting. Then again, they already had her; but on the other hand the longer they had access to TARDIS, the more time they had to understand her.

No, Katie first. She was the one he had promised, she was the one both threatened and threatening. Besides, it was never good to leave her unsupervised for long. Stuff tended to happen.

Having used all of two seconds to see and think all this, the Doctor looked around, doing a swift check for any Rahki. Seeing and hearing none—odd on a space ship—he approached a computer access point and turned the sonic on it. Images flashed past as he scanned for where they would have the Energy Extraction going on. The Rahki would certainly have gotten started there immediately, if only to keep themselves safe. Katie was stuffed with all sorts of energy, the most dangerous of which was temporal. It'd have to be siphoned off to some extent.

Ah, a map. Good, he liked maps. Maps were helpful. Oh, but distance wasn't. Three floors down and then it was a good, what, half mile? And that was the direct route through Memory Transfers, where Jahra got processed after they came back from their assignments. Obviously he'd showed up in the Science Quarter of the ship.

So, up then over, or over then up? Or zigzag maybe. Yeah, up over, up over, and up over. Should keep him relatively unseen, which would be a must right now. Be difficult, but he could do it. What was that Katie had told him once? _"You have got to be the worst person at being unseen. I think you live to be seen."_ Yeah, that was mostly true. No fun being clever if no one was watching.

Now that he had wasted ten seconds finding a route and thinking, the Doctor turned down his chosen path, keeping the sonic in his hand.

"Just make sure you fight back Kathryn," he said under his breath. "Just keep fighting."

* * *

*Constructive critisisim welcome, praise happily accepted, flames not wanted*


	2. Chapter 2

Fighting seemed an inevitable occurrence in Katie's near future. She pressed herself against one of the many glass walls, her eyes scanning the hundred Jahra looking at her.

She felt a separate side of her brain examine each of them, tell her where to strike to disable or destroy each of them. The same section of her mind calculated exactly how hard she would need to drive her elbow into the glass wall in order to shatter it, providing her with escape and glass shards as weapons.

Even as most of her took barely a second to plan out a defense, the small part that was left—perhaps the only part of her that was still human—realized that none of the Jahra were attacking. Each one had a different emotion on their face, ranging from near worship to envy and disgust, but none seemed murderous.

Vaguely she noticed that 24 was speaking. She blinked, shook her head a bit, and looked at him. "Sorry, spaced out just then. Ah, could you repeat that?"

"What are you doing here?" 24 repeated distastefully. "Why are you down here with us instead of being put to use?"

"Because this is where I woke up after being kidnapped. Highly inconvenient too. I was about to be executed. Oh well, you can't win them all."

"You wanted to die?" 25 asked, shock plain on her face. Katie shrugged.

"Had no real reason to live."

The room practically exploded.

"What do you mean, no reason to live?"

"You were just going to throw your life away?"

"Why would you want to do that?"

"What's it like to have that choice?"

"I thought you were supposed to come back peacefully. Why did the Changers have to chase you down?"

"What makes you so special that you got your own life?"

"What's your first memory?"

"Or your favorite one?"

"What was the travel like?"

"Is the Doctor as terrible as the histories say, or is there anything good in him?"

"What did he look like?"

"I heard that you still went through the Download; how much of it can you see?"

"Are you down here to get rid of us or something?"

The bombardment of questions kept going, confusing Katie and making her ears hurt. Worried that the escalating sound energy would set of her still high energy levels, Katie decided enough was enough. Putting two fingers in her mouth, she let out a piercing whistle.

The Jahra fell silent and Katie heaved a sigh. "Thank you! Now, before I answer a single question, I've got one of my own."

She paused, hoping that her next phrase wouldn't start another outcry.

"What the hell is the Scorch Project about?"

Total silence met her ears. Katie didn't even think that any of the Jahra were breathing. She glanced around the room.

"Okay…let's try another one: do any of you have solid information about the Scorch Project?"

At least a few of the people were breathing again, and a couple others were exchanges looks of disbelief. 25 was staring at her with round eyes.

"You don't know?"

Katie shook her head. "Not really."

"But…but you have to know!" 25 said, her voice rising. "Why else would you try to escape? If I had a life, I'd die before they brought me back here!"

"I know nothing about it," Katie insisted. "Look, you told me that you know I left Earth before I was supposed to, yah? I left before I had a chance to find out what I was. They never activated—how did you put it—my base layer. Last Cycle, whatever. All I know is that I'm one of you, just messed up to be a killer. After that, I haven't the foggiest."

"I'm confused," a male Jahra on Katie's right said. "How can you be here if you don't know anything?"

"Beg pardon?"

"If you don't know what you're for," the man rephrased, "then how are you still working?"

"Sorry, still not getting it."

"You were supposed to stay on Sol 3 until you turned eighteen," 23 said, jumping in. "They were going to separate you from your family once you left for…I think you call it college on Sol 3. Exactly how it was going to be done, I don't know, but you were going to be replaced by your human then."

Katie blinked. "They were gonna swap me out while I was still there? That makes no sense."

"Oh, stop being delicate 23," 24 sighed. "Just go from the top. You were designed. Thousands of prototypes had to be made, thousands of attempts at fitting all of what you had to be into one person. Finally, you came around, number 3356, officially designated He-Zayin-Aleph, informally known as Scorch. They traded the real human out with you after just one day of life."

Katie could feel the words hitting her like slaps as 24 charged forward with his brief summary. "You lived. The intention was for you to hit age eighteen before going down and turning you on. You'd become Jahra again, you'd remember everything from the Download—"

"What's the Download?" Katie cut in.

"It's what happens to the rest of us to prepare us for our existence," 23 said, shooting a look at 24. "All the information the Rahki have on all of time and space is stuffed into our heads. They never know when or where they're going to send us, so rather than entering a new code each time, they just click the correct file for us to follow."

"And it hurts," one of the Jahra interjected. Murmurs of agreement spread through the group. Katie gave a sort of sideways nod.

"Yeah, that amount of information would be painful."

"It's not the information," 25 said. "It's the fact that we know it all but can never remember seeing it for ourselves. We know that we've been there, at least to some of it, but we can't ever remember. They always take it from us. And…and then there're all the things we know of, but have never felt, or if we have they take that too." She gestured around. "The Epsilon-200 series are four hundred years old. Four hundred years of life and travel, but we only remember this one room. There're no memories, just…data."

Katie inhaled through her nose, looking around at the Jahra, thinking of the thousands not there. "Computers with souls. Oh, you beautiful people."

24 didn't seem moved. "Yeah, lovely. Anyway, once they got you up and running for real, the Reader you carried would start sending out a signal that the Doctor would pick up on at some point. He'd find you, be unable to leave you, and you'd go whirling about the universe while you took in every single scrap of energy you came across, including the temporal stuff in his ship. Particularly the temporal energy."

"Why would temporal energy make a difference?" Katie asked. 23 shrugged.

"That's the part none of us know. There are only a few Rahki that know why you were made, but being with the Doctor was supposed to be because of the temporal energy your traveling would provide."

Katie fiddled with her necklace, thinking. So, the Rahki wanted the temporal energy. They needed plenty of it for…something. The other energy forms—light, heat, sound, brainwaves—were just side effects. But if they wanted temporal energy, why not use someone from Cardiff, or another area in the universe with heavy rift activity? Why go through this whole charade of making Katie, with all the complexities that came with it?

_Oh, I could really use the Doctor's brain right now._

She forced the thought away. He wasn't there, and she was glad. He was safer that way.

Katie started pacing again, muttering as she tried to figure things out, focusing on what she knew and trying to set things up in her mind as the Rahki had meant them to happen. "A college swap would be the easiest since there's a lot of travel and I'm not home, I get that. Why while I'm still there? Put aside. The Doctor comes to me, which creates a save the day set up for him. Normal and very expected.

"If I suddenly figured out what I was while on Earth, I'd be terrified. No, the plan works perfectly. I'd know everything and would just sit and wait. Might put on a show for him, make it seem like I was terrified but I wouldn't be. This makes him take me to see the universe because he can't leave me running loose, I'm smart, and I'm the biggest puzzle to land in his lap since the female mind. I get the bonus of being able to draw on real memories to talk about and be sad over."

Katie finally stopped moving. "But why go through all of that? Why not just make me a kid in Cardiff? Or charge me here? The Rahki send people through time, they have access to the vortex. What good am I supposed to be?"

She looked up at the Jahra, puzzled. She pointed at one of the Jahra who had spoken before. "You, what's your name?"

"Epsilon-296, but most just call me 96."

Katie made a face. "Bad name. 96 isn't a good name. I'm gonna call you Renaldo. Now Renaldo, you said a few minutes ago that I shouldn't be here if I didn't know what I was. How's that work?"

96—newly named Renaldo—blinked in a daze for a moment before answering. "Uh, you're incredibly dangerous. The energy was supposed to be controlled by the programing from the Last Cycle. Slower intake, greater control over what you have, no damage to your body, and a limit were the biggest things."

Katie sighed in a slightly wistful manner. "Oh, don't I wish. Okay another question." She looked around the whole group. "How do you all know so much?"

25 shrugged. "It's part of the computer files, so we get it with the Download."

A light jumped to Katie's eyes. "Then you must know how it ends! What's the Final Stage?"

25 backed up slightly at Katie's intensity. 24 spoke up, nearly sneering. "No one actually knows that. Really, you think a bunch of recorders would be privy to the biggest secret since the Un-tempered Schism? I don't think it's even in the database."

Katie seemed to deflate, then clicked her teeth for a moment as she thought. She lifted her head and shrugged. "Whatever. So, where's the door here?"

"The…door?"

"Yeah. I assume you have one."

"It's over there," Renaldo said with a gesture. "Why?"

"Well, I don't really understand all the information I've been getting from you people," Katie said as she went through the crowd and inspected the small electric panel next to the nearly invisible door. "But I don't have the time to waste sitting in here. I—am leaving."

"You won't get it open," Renaldo said to Katie.

Katie smiled gently at him. "Oh, Renaldo. All that knowledge. All you need is something to spark off the imagination and desire you've got buried." She ran her fingers along the control panel, slid her nails under the small grooves that worked as a seal, and pulled the cover off to reveal the wires.

Carelessly letting the cover drop, she stared hard at the wires for a few moments before reaching for two of them.

"No, not the blue one," Renaldo suddenly said from his spot by her elbow. "The yellow crosses with the orange."

Katie flashed him a wink before changing the wire as instructed and zapping them together. The door slid up, startling the two Rahki guards. Before they could react, Katie felt her bodyweight shifting as she nearly flowed towards them. She hit one in the throat, breaking his hyoid bone and silencing him. Grabbing his gun, she spun about and hit the other guard in the temple with the butt of the gun. He dropped in the same manner as his companion.

Katie felt her mind shift back. She was unable to repress the slight shudder as she realized that she hadn't even thought of them as people. They had been targets, only threats. That had been too easy for her. Far too clean.

She forced practicality to become her foremost thought again as she checked the charge on the gun, popping out the battery the same way she had removed the ammo pack on Earth guns. Pleased to see it was full, she slid the battery back in and picked up the other gun, finding it similarly prepared.

"You killed them."

Katie glanced at 24. "I'd rather them than you," she said as she stripped the bodies of their hand guns, taking the belt from one of them so that she could use it to hold them.

"I wasn't complaining."

Katie met his eyes, the cold in his nearly making her shiver. Gesturing with the gun, she pointed down the short hallway.

"What's this way?" she asked, unable to see around the sharp turn.

"Could be anywhere," 23 said. "We always wake up in this room after the Memory Transfer."

Katie grinned. "Oh, I love the unknown."

She rounded the corner, walking with her eyes closed. There was no sign of body heat, so she continued.

Abruptly she flattened herself against the wall. Around a second sharp turn there was an open doorway with someone moving around. Not knowing how many, she took the battery pack out of one of the guns and tucked it in her stolen belt. Katie took a deep, calming breath, opened her eyes, and walked to the door.

* * *

Rakna was a professor, or at least liked to think so. She was almost one. As soon as she finished her hands-on stuff, she'd get her degree. Though, what use she'd be after that she wasn't sure. The recovery of Scorch would change everything, and geneticists, computer programmers, biologists, anatomists, and other such specialists would no longer be in demand. Still, Rakna wasn't too bothered. She was bright enough that she might get into that new program being whispered about. If the rumors were to be believed, Scorch was going to need an entirely new team of people to monitor it. Rakna wasn't sure why they would need it after using it. Scorch was complicated yes, but it was still just one of the recording Jahra. It would be useless once used, right?

Oh well. That didn't matter at the moment. Right now she was just doing clean up, finishing the last bits of stuff after helping run the Epsilon-200 series through the Memory Transfers, and the required tune-ups of their physical forms. Tomorrow morning Rakna would get her chance at setting them up for their next lives. No, not with Scorch caught. It had completely thrown off the system, and the Epsilon-200's would be incinerated. Pity. They were still in good condition.

Rakna glanced at the empty doorway leading into the holding cell. She'd been doing that all evening, ever since they'd taken the Epsilon-200's in. Assavapisitkul, the Dictator himself, had come down, behind him an escort surrounding a hover bed. Rakna remembered her amazement at seeing Scorch laying there. It was nearly legendary for all Rahki, geneticists like Rakna in particular. So many races and types, all blended and sorted just to make one person!

Not that it had looked very impressive lying there. Just like any other Jahra, though without any specks. Horrendously bright colors. At least the pale skin had given her eyes some relief.

Assavapisitkul had had it placed in with the Epsilon-200's. Why it wasn't in a special holding cell, Rakna didn't know, but it gave her chills to think that Scorch, the one thing that the Dictator had promised would give back their freedom of time travel, was just down that hall.

She glanced again at the door and froze.

Scorch walked slowly towards Rakna, who continued staring wide eyed at it. No, definitely not an it. Scorch was a her. A completely terrifying her, with a two hand guns and a large one on top of everything else she possessed. Rakna wondered briefly how Scorch was going to kill her, and hoped that it was with a single shot. Being drained of energy was not appealing.

Scorch was now a yard from her, holding the gun loosely but with a finger on the trigger. She blinked once, the hideously dark green eyes strangely captivating.

"Breathe," Scorch said bluntly in a strange accent. "It's beneficial to your health."

Rakna gave a start. She inhaled deeply, realizing that she had indeed been holding her breath. She flinched as Scorch raised the gun only to rest the barrel on her own shoulder. She studied Rakna for a few moments.

"Intern?"

Rakna nodded again, finding herself relaxing somewhat. Scorch seemed to pick up on this.

"Shocked I can carry a conversation?"

"Yes," Rakna answered without really thinking. She tensed, wondering what Scorch would do at such an insult. She didn't seem too bothered though.

"Not surprised, considering. After all, with Sontaran blood, you can't really expect much talking, can you?"

"And Canisian," Rakna said. "Humanoid enough to fit your appearance, but your production team considered the extra war tendencies necessary. The appearance seems to be shifting though;" Rakna observed. "Your specks are starting to return."

"You know about the Project?"

Rakna nodded, her student's enthusiasm coming forward. "Everyone studies your DNA. It's the epitome of genetic experimentation! Hundreds of races and species, mingling together, only certain traits highlighted to make you perfect for your purpose, all combined in the triple helix of a Gallifreyan Time Lord!"

"What room is this?" Scorch asked, not sounding very impressed.

"Memory Transfer, though your recovery has sort of negated its purpose. It'll probably be turned into something else, since we're incinerating all Jahra."

Scorch blinked again, slower this time, her eyelids closing sideways like any other Jahra. She didn't open her eyes back up all the way.

"You know the way out of here?"

"To…to where?" Rakna asked, nervous at the sudden hardness in Scorch's voice.

"Anywhere. Generic away."

Rakna nodded. "Good. Take it," Scorch ordered.

"What?" Rakna asked, sounding slightly offended. Scorch took a large step forward, her expression never changing as she stood close to Rakna, their noses nearly touching.

"I am being very calm right now, because I have no wish to kill anyone I don't have to. So, I'm telling you again." Scorch's eyes narrowed into slits.

"Run."

* * *

*Constuctive critisisim welcome, praise happily accepted, flames not wanted*


	3. Chapter 3

Katie watched the intern run off. Seemed she already had a reputation, and she'd only just shown herself.

She frowned. Something was bugging her, something important that she couldn't remember. Something really, really big. It'd been driving her mad all day, and she still couldn't figure out what it was.

Having no time to waste, Katie pushed the problem aside and found what looked like a computer, intending to find a map and a route to the hanger bay or whatever the Rahki called the place they put their smaller ships. Katie just wanted to get out. She'd figure out the next step after that.

Yet, as she sat in front of the screen, she couldn't help thinking. She was on a Rahki ship; she could feel the engines under her feet. They'd definitely have the files on her in the database.

What was she really? What purpose had the Rahki had in mind when they'd started on the Scorch Project all those years back?

On the other hand, the Doctor had read her files back on Kurunathan, and then he'd left with no goodbye, or explanation. What could make even the Doctor scared?

Could she stand to know the full truth?

If she knew, maybe she would have less chance to hurt someone. Maybe she could find a way to fix herself if she knew. Maybe she wouldn't have to die, and maybe if she was fixed she could start traveling again, and maybe she could stop being Scorch and maybe she could even find a way to see her family again, and maybe—and maybe she would be something so horrible that she would beg the Krize to kill her.

Before Katie could change her mind, she went through the computer system, soon finding the file on herself. Opening it, a summary of the project popped up on the screen, everything well organized, with little buttons if she wanted to see more about a certain stage. She began reading the outline.

* * *

**Stage One; Creation: Complete**

_**i.**_ Thousands of bodies were run through trial until number 3356 (official designation He-Zayin-Aleph) finally survived. DNA was then used to create a small child, the same size of a human of the age of one day. Scorch was run through the Download, then had the section locked off until the Last Cycle. Intelligence is expected to leak through as planned. Being placed on Sol 3, the intelligence will likely manifest itself as complete comprehension of numbers and math. A wide array of computer skills and manipulation of computer codes will appear as a result.

**_i.i._** Due to amount of bodies and decaying flesh, two Naime were employed to create a sort of air freshener. They were paid adequately. Termination is still recommended.

_**ii. **_Abilities: Energy absorption from all things in environment save people, knowledge of a Jahra, and physical strength. Should other energies be taken in with the temporal, temporal energy shall be stored separate from the other forms.

**_ii.i._** While energy has the tendency to destroy, Scorch will not take in enough before the Last Cycle to do herself any damage.

_**iii.**_ Programming notes: Should the Last Cycle fail in some way, her triple helix from Time Lord DNA allows her to have physical contact with the Doctor without draining him, though others will be susceptible to instant draining. Her body recognizes the triple helix as her own and sees no use to drain herself of life.

**_iv._** DNA: Rahki (for knowledge and base code) Sontaran (for warfare), Human (for feeling), Ihu (for intelligence), Haxal (for agility), Grixzen (for drive), Time Lord (single cell for link to Doctor), Dalek(for anger and hate) multiple others for various purposes.

* * *

Okay, nothing new there, though the explanation of why computers made such sense to her was nice. She really should have seen it before, to be truthful. After all, Earth ran everything on math and numbers. Computer code was just number series.

Katie was slightly irked that she wasn't even supposed to drain people of energy. It almost made her wish that the Rahki _had_ started the Last Cycle. Almost.

It was disturbing to know that the Naime she had met so long ago, on her first real trip with the Doctor, had made the odorless dirt to hide the smell of her decaying predecessors. Katie inhaled deeply as it hit her that 3355 people had died before she finally came around. More blood on her head. Who would all those people have become, had they been allowed to live?

Making herself move past the thought, she read the next section.

* * *

**Stage Two; Earth: Complete**

**_i._** Place Scorch on Earth to become human, Doctor's favorite race. Several events set up to make her extremely empathetic towards him, main event being the plant known as Bradley Isaac Rogers.

_**ii.**_ Scorch's original will be replaced before her eyes, cutting her off from her family while being unable to go to them.

**_iii._** At age eighteen, her genetic code shall be unlocked through the Last Cycle, allowing her full access to the Download and knowledge of who she is, as well as the Energy Absorption properties. The forefront of her mind shall remain human to allow her to function with the Doctor, but her base layer shall be in control.

_**iii.i.**_ Note: Krize interference cut her years on Earth off early. Her human was replaced without difficulty.

* * *

Katie sat back in the chair, her face turning pale as she tried to absorb the information. Her whole life: moving to California from Texas, the hatred from classmates and inability to fit in, the loss of all she had called family, every painful thing she'd ever felt, had been because she was supposed to be like the Doctor.

Even Buck—Bradley. Her dearest friend, the one she had shot and killed when she was thirteen, who died because of her stupidity and anger, the one she had betrayed after death by slandering his name…he'd been a set up. He'd been placed there, or found, or used, just to make her a killer.

Katie curled her lips in and bit her bottom lip, holding back her tears. Her whole life had been fake. Everything. She'd never had a say in it, never had a choice. She—

No. Not her, Katie realized. Gina's life. Katie had been living the life of Gina Alexis O'Conner, a girl who had nothing to do with space, or danger, or death, or heartbreak, or murder. Nothing until she'd been replaced with Kathryn. Replaced by Scorch.

Katie had ruined—no, not ruined, destroyed. Katie had destroyed—no, even that was too soft a word. Katie had completely decimated an innocent girl's life, shaped her mind and world to be a living hell just because the Rahki wanted a battery for something.

No wonder the Doctor had thrown her away.

Not really wanting to read more, yet knowing she had to, Katie forced herself to continue.

* * *

**Stage Two point One; Absorption: Unknown**

**_i._** Due to inability to completely close off this trait, it shall remain at non-lethal levels until Scorch turns eighteen in Earth years, at which point the Last Cycle will allow collection to increase in strength. Without the Last Cycle, she will drain people directly upon contact. Other side effects may occur, and shall we dealt with during the scheduled check-ups.

_**ii.**_ Once the Last Cycle has been started, her Jahra physiology shall return. During her time in the TARDIS Type-40 she will store energy from the vortex. When required levels are reached, retrieval shall commence.

**_ii.i._** Current levels unknown as the Reader was damaged due to Krize interference

**Stage Two point Two; Last Cycle: Activation disturbed**

**_i._** The Last Cycle is intended to occur at age eighteen. It included the unlocking of her Jahra genes and release of the Download. Physical activation is required.

_**ii.**_ Due to the danger that could occur if absorption occurs unchecked, the Last Cycle will also place several barriers on her limits, aid in her control, prevent cellular destruction, and slow down the absorption rate. This will stretch her time with the Doctor to several years.

**_iii._** Without the Last Cycle, she will be lethal to all living things with a similar DNA structure. The rarity of the Doctor's triple helix will protect him. Discussion was raised as to whether or not it would be better to program her to extract energy from living things, but was discarded due to lethality and possibility of overloading her cells.

_**iv.**_ The Last Cycle is a time period where information and instincts from her Jahra roots will activate, leaving her outwardly still connected to the Doctor, yet her essence will belong to us, thus insuring the completion of the Final Stage. The majority of her mind will remain human, degrading the more energy she absorbs. Her shrinking human side will cling evermore to the Doctor, and he will respond by trying to protect her further.

**_iv.i._** This was prevented by Krize interference. It is not expected to interfere greatly with the Final Stage.

* * *

So, Katie would still have had some of her humanity, even as she slowly understood that she would no longer be one. Lovely. Just what a Rahki would do to something grown in a test tube.

She frowned. If her humanity was based on her energy, how long…

No. Back to reading.

* * *

**Stage Three; Integration: Near Complete**

**_i. _**At this time the signal from her Reader shall activate, altering the Doctor to her presence on Sol 3. He shall investigate and find no choice but to take her with him, both because of her apparent state as a free Jahra and the pre-entered connections.

_**i.i.**_ Due to Krize interference, Scorch's transporter to us activated early, instead delivering her to the Doctor. She survived the move, but though her genes began to unlock the Download was not released, resulting in her mind remaining solely human, but with a cracked seal. Knowledge seeps through at a faster rate. It is unknown what effect this will have on her psyche. Problems may occur during retrieval, as the transporter action of her Reader was already used. This has damaged readings of location and energy levels. Problems are not expected to interfere greatly with the Final Stage.

_**ii.**_ Scorch will continue with the Doctor as a traveling companion. As with all friends he will cling to her, but her genetic bond will strengthen the link. The failure to begin the Last Cycle had also caused the Doctor to be the only one she can come into physical contact with, creating an even stronger bond. Her confusion and abrupt removal from her perceived family has also made connection.

**Stage Three point One; Extraction: Near Complete**

**_i._** Tests are being continued on the planet Kurunathan in the planetary asylum. Promising results came from the E'akru beings, though more are still required to extract everything from Scorch.

_**ii.**_ WARNING! The Doctor and Scorch arrived on Kurunathan at the tail end of these tests. While this gave us the chance to examine her and install a new Reader, the second attempt at activating the Last Cycle was interrupted by the Doctor. However, because she returned to her natural form before being properly programmed on Earth, the energy stored inside her has had free reign. Her cells are degenerating as nearly as soon as they are repaired. This will become worse as she draws in more energy. Scorch also seems able to see the energy. She had spent some time near a temporal rift, and the charge that should have taken years is nearly complete.

**_ii.i._** The vast amounts of power are also breaking down the barriers to her base code. The human part of her mind is still dominant, causing physical and emotional turmoil. This could cause problems, but she should finish charging before the Doctor can take notice. It may have the added bonus of drawing the Doctor to her as a new, dangerous puzzle.

* * *

So, her base code—base layer, whatever—was coming through. What exactly did that mean? Was that the important thing that she couldn't quite remember? Some deep layer to her mind and DNA that was slowly coming through? If so, was that a good thing? What would happen? Would she revert completely to the life and mindset of a Jahra? Would there be nothing left of Katie but an empty, heartless computer? Or would she be completely erased? If the Krize didn't get her body and execute her, her own mind would.

Katie looked down at the next step.

* * *

**Stage Four; Final Stage: On Standby**

* * *

Katie snorted. After finding out so much—all of it not good—it was irritating to be stopped by a single sentence. Not even a sentence; a note.

Katie clicked her teeth and started fiddling with her crystal necklace, pondering everything she had just read.

Most of it was painful, showing the complete disregard the Rahki had for others. Use, abuse, throw aside. Yet, under that carelessness, the entire thing showed huge drive and determination.

Katie laughed humorlessly, her eyes stinging as she shook her head ruefully at a thought. "Doctor, you lying bastard," she muttered to herself. He'd told her she was a prototype for an army. You didn't go through all this to make an army. It was about revenge on the Doctor. From what she'd seen, the Rahki hated him with a passion. The Scorch Project, like everything else in the universe, was all about him. Katie was just a tool, a weapon to use against him. No wonder he had left without a goodbye.

No, there was something more. The Doctor was an enormous part of the Final Stage, but he wasn't all of it. There had to be a really, really good reason to make Katie so dangerous. The Rahki needed temporal energy, but not just any temporal energy. They needed it pure, and they needed a lot of it. What could you possibly want something like that for? A weapon? A battering ram? Power for something?

Katie let go of her necklace and rubbed her forehead. She knew more about herself, but she hated all of it. What hurt the most was how her existence had damaged Gina's family so badly. And Gina herself. Katie had had the chance to crawl out of her depression after the event at TORCHWOOD. Gina would still be in it, still suffering. And who knew what else had happened to her? Katie hadn't exactly planned out what could be considered a beautiful future. What more would Gina go through because Katie had lived her life for her?

Katie sighed. She'd have time to sort this all out later, once she was away. She stood up from her chair and gave a start when she turned around.

"What are all of you doing here?" she asked, staring at the Jahra. It looked like the entire hundred Jahra from the Epsilon-200 series had followed her.

"We're coming with you," 25 declared. Katie stared at her.

"No, you're not."

"We can't exactly stay here," 23 said. "We know what's coming, and you just gave us the way out the holding cell."

"So take it and go somewhere!" Katie insisted.

"We are," 24 said, the wiry man giving Katie a look. She noticed that he was holding the empty gun she'd left behind as she rubbed her forehead.

"Oh, Tom, Dick, and Harry speaking for the group. Lovely." Katie paused. "No. Thomas, Dickenson, and Harriet. Sounds better that way. More refined and fancy. More fun to say it that way." She looked back at the group. "You all know that the Rahki are looking for me…" Her voice petered out. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

"You did it again," Renaldo said.

"Did what?"

"Named some of us. We're numbers to everyone else, but you…gave us names."

Katie stared with her mouth open before covering her face with her hands and groaning. "Oi, feed a stray dog…"

"What?" Harriet—previously 25—asked, not quite hearing Katie.

"Nothing. Look, you all have a better chance of leaving if you aren't with me."

"We wouldn't know the first thing about escaping," Thomas—once 23—said. "You've probably had experience."

"I'm not the best—"

Katie turned her head sharply as the door slid open and three Rahki came in. Katie glimpsed the intern behind them. Already irritated that the Epsilon-200's had followed her, the added intrusion was not helpful to her mood. Ignoring the large gun lying on the desk, she pulled one of the hand guns from her belt and leveled it at the three Rahki.

Her Texan accent thickened as she spoke sharply. "Ya'll have about three seconds before I start firing, and believe you me I am a great shot."

The one in front raised an eyebrow. "And how would a Jahra know how to fire a gun?"

Katie stared coolly at the man. "Ya'll heard of Scorch?" she asked, purposefully loosening her death-grip on her continuously rising energy levels. Multi-colored lightning instantly started dancing on her arms as the men beat a hasty retreat. As soon as the doors were shut Katie shot the keypad by the door, sealing it. She turned back to the group of Jahra as mauve lights started to flash and alarms began blaring.

"We don't have time for arguing." She tossed the extra battery pack to Dickenson—who used to be 24. "Put that back in the gun. Don't fire unless they shoot first, and then make sure they drop with as few shots as possible." Katie picked up the other large gun and handed it to the closest Jahra. "Here. If you can't fire it, give it to someone who will."

She glared at the rest of them. "I want ya'll to be very clear on this. Any place I go is going to be full of bloodshed. This ain't gonna be pretty in any sense of the word. Someone tries to kill you, kill 'em right back. But only shoot if they shoot first."

She turned to Renaldo. "You've got the entire database in your head; how do we get to the smaller vehicles?"

Renaldo stood with a momentary glazed look. "We can use the ventilation system to get a few decks down, and then—"

"Good enough for now. Let's move."

* * *

The Doctor looked up and around as lights started to flash. Ducking into a nearby alcove, he wondered if they were for him as several Rahki with guns went running past.

Looking around, he noticed another computer port. It was currently flashing mauve with white lettering on it. After checking for further running men with guns, he quickly went to it. The grin came to his face despite—or because of—the current warning.

BREAKOUT

"Good girl Kathryn."

* * *

*Constructive critisisim welcome, praise happily accepted, flames not wanted*


	4. Chapter 4

Katie slid down the ventilation shaft as quickly as she could without going into a free fall. She was anything but happy with this arrangement. The last thing she needed right now was a hundred grown men and women following her around.

Far in the back, she could hear Thomas, Dickenson, and Harriet directing the others along. Renaldo was directly behind Katie, giving directions. Katie knew that, however inconvenient, she would be stupid to pass up the chance to ask questions.

"So, Renaldo. What's with the Rahki's hair?"

"What do you mean? Left at the bottom."

"All of them look like they stuck their heads in glue bottles and put in contacts to make their eyes lighter. Do they have something against color?"

"I'm not sure how it started, but over the past few hundred years, they've dressed and used less and less colors in everything that I've seen. My guess would be that they're trying to make themselves as different from the Jahra as possible."

"Is that why you all have red hair and green eyes?" Katie asked as she paused, waiting for five Rahki to move away from a grate before crawling over it.

"I think so. And our specks are less pronounced. You didn't even have any, though they seem to be coming back now. We still have the same physiology though."

"Is that why I've been blinking sideways for the past half hour?" Katie said as she started friction climbing down another shaft.

"As opposed to…"

"I've been human for most of my life, and before today, I've been blinking up and down," Katie said in an irritated fashion. "Real distracting blinking sideways."

"I thought you reverted back long before this," one of the other Jahra said as Katie quietly dropped onto another cross-shaft.

"Nope. Last Cycle wasn't run, so I didn't change. But because the Last Cycle wasn't run, I'm burning through my fail safes and all programing I once had. That reminds me, any of ya'll know what a 'base code' is for one of us fleshy computers?"

"Go down and take the second left. Use the third grate you see to get into the hallway below," Renaldo instructed before answering. "I'm not sure what it is for you, but for the rest of us it's simply the basic programming we all get. It tells us to obey the Rahki no matter what happens or where we are."

"Well ain't that just peachy," Katie said sarcastically. "Best we get a move on then. I don't wanna still be here when that bit of data breaks through, along with whatever else they've attached to me."

_Or when I lose me._

Katie stopped in front of the grate, but before opening it she closed her eyes and did a swift check for energy signatures down below. The still-flashing lights and blaring alarms didn't help any, but as near as she could figure there wasn't anyone too close.

Popping the grate open she dropped down into the hallway below her, crouching and holding her hand gun ready. After doing an initial sweep, she gestured silently for Renaldo to send the others down. As Jahra started dripping from the ceiling Katie kept a look-out for any nasty surprises.

She grimaced and touched her forehead lightly as a slight pang went through it. If it meant what she thought, things were not going to be looking up any time soon.

Catching sight of the Jahra she had forced a gun on earlier, she motioned him over.

"Are you sure you can use that?" Katie asked. The man nodded shakily. Katie softened her look.

"Okay buddy, you don't have to lie. You don't feel comfortable with that in your hand, or with the thought of killing someone, give the gun to someone else. There is nothing wrong with not being able to kill. It makes you the better man if you can't. But I can't have people freezing up when—notice that I said when not if—the shooting starts." Katie tilted her head. "You got a name?"

"Epsilon-2—"

"No numbers. Pick a name for yourself and start getting others to do the same. I don't want ya'll thinking of yourselves as numbers, got it?" Katie winked at the man and sent him back to the others as she saw Dickenson drop down from the grate, gun still in his hands. He made a beeline for Katie.

"How do you work one of these?"

"Point and shoot. I'm guessing that's semi-automatic, or as automatic as an energy gun can get. Don't worry about precision. Just get the job done. And remember; only if they start shooting first, and even then you wait until I start firing. We aren't looking for a bloodbath. You get me?"

"Scorch!" one of the Jahra hissed, pointing down the hallway. "I think someone's coming!"

Katie instantly started issuing orders. "Anyone not holding a weapon get flat against the walls. Renaldo, keep anyone still in the ventilation up there. Anyone holding a weapon take up a position near the hallway. Everyone stay out of sight if possible, and no noise. Maybe they won't see us."

Everyone immediately did as Katie said. Katie pressed herself against the hallway entrance, thoughts dancing about. Part of her mind thought that this had a vaguely Star Wars feel to it. The rest of her was relishing the feel of adrenaline. It had been months since her last rush, far too long. Along with the rush came a slight pang at how she was teaching these people to kill. The Doctor never would have stood for it.

_Well he's not here, is he?_ she told herself viciously. _He's not here, and you don't want him here anyway. So you find your own way out. Discussion over._

Katie closed her eyes, watching the group of maybe five Rahki jogging towards them in the adjoining hallway, their heat signatures standing out against the flashing lights and blaring alarms. Going by the shape of the empty spaces, they were all armed. She saw the one in front point at the hallway she and the other Jahra were in.

Another headache hit, so she opened her eyes and gave Dickenson a hard stare, reminding him of what she had just told him, very worried that he would ignore it. He was obviously very bitter about his life, and was more than ready to take it out on the Rahki.

The first two entered Katie's hallway. She kept her eyes locked with Dickenson's as the other's entered, nodding once, twice…

On the third nod she turned sharply, bringing up her hand gun. In quick succession she shot three of the Rahki in the back of the neck. Dickenson managed to shoot one in the back and the other—as yet nameless—Jahra hit the last one in the leg before Katie ended his suffering.

Without giving anyone time to recover from the action, Katie started giving orders again. "Renaldo, get everyone else down here. I need five people who think they can steal someone's life and still keep walking."

Seven Jahra stepped forward. Katie handed the first five the Rahki's—what were they? Not knowing the proper name, Katie made the executive and private decision to call them phaser rifles. It was close enough, and they looked like the Star Trek guns.

After extracting the battery packs from the five handhelds, she decided they looked universal enough that they would work in the phaser rifles and gave those to her new firing squad.

"Renaldo, which way next?"

"Go left, then take the third right. Find the first ventilation shaft on the floor and go down one level, then out into the hallway again."

Giving him a casual salute, Katie took the Jahra already in the hallway and started off.

* * *

The Doctor was using his sonic to go through the ships schematics. The first thing on Katie's mind would be to get to a transport ship, and she'd go as quickly as possible, but wouldn't want to be seen. She'd try the ventilation and use those as much as possible, but unless she went the very long way around she'd have to come out at some point. So, what hallway would he be likeliest to find her at?

Ah, that one. Two levels up from the docking bay. There were few routes that wouldn't take her past there. He'd have to get there first though. If he missed her by even a second, she'd be gone and he wouldn't be able to find her before she got to the Krize.

The Doctor momentarily wondered where the Krize were. He'd expected them to follow the Rahki. They should have been here by now. He could use a distraction right now.

Then again, if they were here he'd have to fight both the Rahki and the Krize for Katie. Maybe it was better that they weren't here.

Turning, the Doctor started on his way.

* * *

Following Renaldo's instructions, Katie moved forward, Dickenson next to her. The other gunmen were spread out among the rest of the Jahra.

"Did the Doctor teach you this?" Dickenson asked as another group of Rahki went past them unknowingly. Katie gave him a look.

"No. Why would you think that?"

"All the information on him makes him sound like a mass murderer. I figured he would have taught you how to kill."

"Heh, no," Katie said, moving quickly to the next hall. "The Doctor would probably go all Time Lord on me if he knew what I was doing. What's one of his names, Oncoming Storm or somesuch? He'd use that look and we'd get into a fight over morals. We did that a lot."

"But didn't he destroy his own planet? Everything in the database—"

"What put there by the Rahki," Katie said tightly. "Not exactly trustworthy. The only killing he ever does is when people try so hard to get away from him that they end up committing suicide, or someone we've run across kills them. Trust me, the Doctor is real big on second chances."

"Then why isn't he here with you?"

"I'm glad he's not."

"I thought you were supposed to be attached to him."

Katie glanced away. "I am, and that's why I don't want him here. I still don't get why the Rahki would go through all the trouble and technicalities of the Scorch project, but in the end it's going to hurt him, and I want him as far from here as possible."

"If he's not a mass murderer, what is he?"

Katie smile was genuine for the first time in she didn't know how long. "He's absolutely brilliant. I'd like nothing better than to be traveling with him right now. He's completely insane, but I'd place my life in his hands. I've done it actually, and I've always gotten out. He's beyond compassionate, always looking for the good in everything and so brave. He's just brilliant."

Katie turned around and did a swift head count, then groaned to herself. This wasn't going to work. This many people in one spot? Way too easy to find.

"Okay, we've got six Jahra with guns plus me. Divvy up into six groups of fourteen and one group of sixteen. Each group gets a gun man, and I get the sixteen. Renaldo, use that brilliant computer mind of yours and find seven separate routes to the hanger bay."

"We're splitting up?" Harriet asked. Katie nodded.

"We're more likely to get out alive if we do. Remember, stay out of sight, don't look for confrontation, fire only when in real danger, make it as clean as possible, take the weapon battery packs from whoever you're forced to kill. Renaldo!"

"Got 'em."

"Give me the first one, then tell the other groups theirs. Join the last bunch moving out."

Renaldo nodded. "You're going to use this shaft. Down three levels, take the right, a left, up one. Out into the hallway, left past the Tertiary Cloning Ward, then a right at the Medics Dormitory."

"Sounds like a busy area."

"It'll have to do. Into the ventilation system again, down two levels—"

"How big is this place?" Katie exclaimed.

"The entire Rahki race lives here," Renaldo said. "It's a flying planet. Now, once you've gone down, go left, second right, straight, down one, right, left, down two, and take the second left. You got all that?"

"Mostly. If I get lost I'll ask one of your cousins."

"Good."

"Whoever gets there first, pick several small ships, but don't leave yet. Ya'll need to try and get away together." Katie winked. "See you down there."

* * *

*Constructive critisisim welcome, praise happily accepted, flames not wanted*


	5. Chapter 5

The Doctor went as quickly as he could, but the alert was still on. Katie had to be using the ventilation system if she was avoiding capture this long. Not surprising though; after all, she was Katie. She'd be able to do something like that.

Of course, being Katie, she might be fighting her way out. A sudden image of Katie walking down a hallway shooting dozens of Rahki popped into the Doctor's head before he shook it out. Katie would fight to keep her hold on her own life, especially if the energy was eating down to her base code, and Scorch was pushing her way out. Katie had been through too much to let something made by the Rahki steal her body. She'd avoid becoming a weapon for as long as possible.

Didn't Earth have the saying 'The road to hell is paved with good intentions?' Why did that seem to fit the current situation? That wasn't so good. Oh, how he hated his brain sometimes.

Could he be so sure that she had gone straight to the smaller ships? She was crazy enough that she might have clambered up to the bridge to have a chat with Assavapisitkul the Rahki Dictator. She might have broken into the Rahki computers and hunted down her files, in which case he was going to get an earful when he found her. Or she might have pulled over to try and free the other Jahra. It'd be very much Katie to try and start a Revolution, which would explain why the alarm was still going.

Several things happened at once. The Doctor came into a four-way juncture as laser fire started up around his ears. Someone shouted at him as a hand latched onto his arm and dragged him into one of the other corridors. He caught sight of someone with red hair swing into the spot he had been standing and start shooting as the Doctor was practically passed backwards and guns continued to discharge. A few seconds later the firing stopped.

"Claim the battery packs and get moving!" a man with a wiry voice snapped out. The group of red-heads flowed into the hallway as the man who had given the order turned to the Doctor, suspicion in his eyes as he looked the Doctor up and down.

"Who are you and what are you doing here?"

The Doctor stood up, his hands lifted slightly in a peaceful gesture. He had no intention of being shot with the rifle the man had.

"I'm looking for my friend. Her name's Kathryn."

"Don't know anyone by that name."

The Doctor's mind examined the man and ran though the dozens of possibilities of who he might be. The Doctor sighed as he hit upon it.

"Oh, she didn't. Kathryn actually set you loose. She would too. Is she here?"

"Is who here?"

"Of course, you're a Jahra. Is Scorch here?"

The man became even tenser. "What do you want her for?"

"I'm the Doctor. I'm here to find her, find TARDIS, and get Scorch out."

One of the other Jahra appeared by the wiry man's elbow. "Dickenson, we have to get moving," she said as she handed him a battery pack. Dickenson took it.

"Was anyone hurt Harriet?"

"Yes. Javran's been killed and Reesha's been hit in the leg."

"Wrap it tight and help her along as best we can. We aren't leaving anyone behind if we can help it. How many gunners do we have?"

"Only four, including you."

"Good. Murderers like me are the last thing we need an abundance of." Dickenson turned back to the Doctor. "It goes against every scrap of knowledge I have, Doctor, but Scorch spoke very highly of you. We're meeting up with her and five other groups in the hanger bay. I can't guarantee she'll be happy to see you, but you can come with us."

The Doctor moved with the group, though the fact that some were carrying weapons didn't sit well with him. "Is Kathryn the one that had you take up arms?"

Dickenson's mouth twitched in a quick smile. "She said that you wouldn't approve. She also laid down some pretty strict rules that I have no trouble following."

"And those would be…"

"Shoot only when shot at, and always make it as quick and painless for them as possible."

"Why not avoid killing at all?"

Dickenson looked coolly at the Doctor. "The Rahki have no regard for us Doctor. We're all following Scorch's orders because none of us want to die without at least trying to live. We can either let them take us to be incinerated, or we can fight back and maybe live. She at least gave us the choice. I can't say I'm sorry that it upsets you, but for us it truly is kill or be killed, and I have no reason to die today."

_Yeah, she's started a Revolution. Brilliant. Hope I don't have to clean it up._ the Doctor thought. Still, he couldn't help but be a little proud that Katie was helping out someone along the way.

* * *

The Rahki must have found a way to center in on Katie, because right now there were about fifteen of them all firing at she and her sixteen Jahra. More Rahki were likely on the way. Five of the Jahra had the stomach for killing, while the others were firmly pacifist. Good. The less killers the better.

Katie grimaced as another shot of pain lanced through her skull. It was getting worse. She _so_ did not have time for this.

"Paxal, Sarancho, I'm about to do something really stupid. If I fall—as in die—use the time and run. Don't wait for me or bother about my body. I'll catch up."

"How will you catch up if you're dead?"

"I'll explain later." Katie took a deep breath and rolled out into the three way juncture, stopping in a crouch. Her eyes were closed, everything coming up in third person view. It was like a CG simulation with limited color. Katie felt very detached from the whole thing as she watched herself sweep her leg out, giving herself spin as she fired the hand guns, hitting all targets the first time. Small streaks of light and heat rushed at her character, the energy tickling slightly as it was absorbed, not doing a speck of damage. Katie felt a strange euphoria for a moment.

Then a sudden wave crashed over her head. Something cold and factual was crushing her, trying to erase all evidence of her soul and stuff her life into a file. Katie was drowning in her own body as her programming fought to take over.

Katie forced her eyes open, making herself stop the shooting. It was done anyway. She stood in the middle of the cross-section, breathing heavily through her nose. Katie swallowed hard, silently vowing to never blink or use her energy view again. Next time, she might not get away.

Katie looked back at the sixteen Jahra and waved them forward, ignoring the now constant headache. "Get the battery packs and let's move!"

* * *

Katie kicked open the vent and crawled out, ushering the others behind her as she gave more directions.

"Find the others, find a ship, and get on it. Remember, at least three different ships. Makes a greater chance you'll all get out." She raised her head and shouted across to the two groups coming through the doors. "Malcolm! What's your head count?"

"We lost two and have one injured."

"Renaldo?"

"We were worse off. Ran into a much larger group, lost five."

Katie went to the three groups already at the ships. They had found four small transports, large enough for twenty each. She nodded her approval.

"Well done. How many did we lose over here?"

"Our three groups lost ten all told."

Katie sighed. "That's seventeen. Dickenson shown up yet?"

"I think that's him now. Looks like he only lost one. Eighty two of us left then." The man frowned. "Who's the tall guy?"

Katie turned around to look.

* * *

*Constructive critisisim welcome, praise happily accepted, flames not wanted*


	6. Chapter 6

The Doctor looked where Dickenson was pointing and saw Katie standing among a large group of Jahra. The person she was talking to caught sight of the Doctor and made some kind of a comment, which caused Katie to turn. He knew when she saw him. She looked like she had seen a ghost, or something similar.

As if in a daze she started walking towards him, then jogging, then she broke into a run. The Doctor braced his feet as she practically threw herself at him and he caught her in a hug. The other Jahra were kind enough to move away to give them some privacy.

Katie slowly tensed, as if remembering something. She loosened her grip and looked up at him.

"What are you doing here?" she asked him.

"I came to get you."

"Is TARDIS here someplace?" Katie asked.

The Doctor nodded. "Rahki took her at the same time they took you, but she's about somewhere."

"Good. Find her and leave."

The Doctor gave her a look, feeling a little hurt but mostly confused. "Why are you always trying to get rid of me?"

Katie's voice was just a bit thick, like it was hard to tell him. "Because the further from me you are, the safer you will be. I found the files Doctor. I know you lied to me back down on Earth. You said I was supposed to be a soldier, but I'm not. I'm just a storage tank and lure. It's all about you. In the end, it's always about you."

Finally, it clicked in the Doctor's mind why she hadn't answered her phone back on Kurunathan when he had tried to call. Even if she hadn't completely understood it then, she'd refused to come back for the same reason he'd refused to chase her down. It was like some twisted version of O. Henry's **Gift of the Magi**.

"Kathryn, I came here to save you."

"I know, and you have no idea what that means to me, but you can't be here. We both know that if you hang about here they'll get the Final Phase going, whatever it is, and the whole universe is gonna go. I have no intention of being responsible for a dead universe, thank you very much."

"Where'd you find all these people?" the Doctor asked, changing the subject. Katie smiled lightly.

"They were my cell mates. I didn't try to bring them, honestly I didn't. They just…decided to follow me."

"How do Jahra decide to follow you? I'd think they'd be infuriated at your special treatment."

Katie sighed, and the Doctor could see the self-irritation. "I named one of them."

"You named one."

"I was being me and I didn't like how they were all just numbers so I told one I was going to call him Renaldo and it stuck and then I named three of them Thomas, Dickenson and Harriet and they just kept following me. I really didn't try, it just…happened."

The Doctor chuckled at her obvious discomfort, though he was a little worried when he noticed that she was speaking Rahki and her Texan accent was gone. He decided not to mention it, so turned to another topic that was bothering him.

"I met Dickenson. He said that you taught them all how to kill."

Katie seemed hurt that he would bring it up now, and she went on the defensive. "We don't all live in your world of ideals, Doctor. Not everyone plays by your rules. The Rahki have nothing against shooting those people, because to the Rahki, the Jahra are just fancy computers. They don't even have proper memories of their own!"

"So you decide to teach them how to kill others?"

"I taught them to defend themselves," Katie hissed. "The group you were with, how many fights did they start? Was there any sort of bloodbath? Did they murder people in cold blood? Did they torture or mutilate the people they killed? How many patrols did they hide from?"

Her rhetorical questions were true, but that didn't negate the issue. "It's still wrong Kathryn."

"Wrong for who, Doctor?"

The Doctor looked at Katie in hurt astonishment, stepping back slightly as she stared defiantly up at him. "What happened to you Kathryn?" he asked. "You aren't the person that crashed into TARDIS all those months back."

Katie looked away from him for a moment, and when she turned back her eyes had tears in them.

"What's my name Doctor?

"What?"

"My name. My human name. What—is—my—name?"

"Gina," he answered promptly, though with curiosity in his voice. "Why do you ask?"

Katie swallowed hard. "Because I don't remember it. I don't remember my mother's name. I don't remember how old my cousins are. I don't remember what my brother looks like. You're right; I'm not the girl that showed up in TARDIS. I'm not even human anymore, Doctor, because I don't remember what it's like to be a human."

"Is that what you've been trying to remember?" the Doctor asked quietly. Katie bit her bottom lip.

"I don't know. But I do know that the only thing human I have right now is righteous anger against these Rahki for what they've done and my hope that at least these eighty-two Jahra can get out and live. So don't take this from me. It's all I have left."

The Doctor could see how much it cost Katie to say that. Her energy was burning through any restraints her mind had, uncovering her base code while destroying her. The Doctor groaned slightly.

"Oh Kathryn. You're much too young to have to go through this."

Katie stared at the Doctor in hurt disbelief. "Too young?" she said in disgust. "Too _young_?" she repeated in anger. "I'm not 'too young' to kill people. I'm not 'too young' to be ripped from everything and everyone I love. I'm not 'too young' to be turned into a weapon. I'm not 'too young' to have a planet nearly destroyed just because I'm standing on it. I'm not 'too young' to be hunted by the most powerful species the universe has. I'm not 'too young' to have scientists poking and prodding me to make sure I'm working right. I'm not 'too young' to have my life and my identity stripped from me while I watch. I'm not 'too young' to make the decision to keep my friends safe. I'm not 'too young' to have _you_ run from me. I'm not 'too young' to lose everything without a goodbye. I'm not 'too young' to screw up everything I ever do and kill everyone I go near."

Katie swallowed hard, obviously debating her next words. "I don't care that you're sixty times my age, Doctor," she said in a clear voice. "In every way that really counts, I'm just as old and damaged as you and you can't do a damn thing to help me. Now if you can't handle that then take your puffed up pride and your self-righteous bullshit back to your little blue box, and leave. I have eighty-two people to save, and I don't need you to do it."

The main doors to the hangar bay slid open, revealing two dozen Rahki soldiers, all armed and more than ready to kill.

The Doctor pulled out his sonic to shut the doors as Katie smoothly lifted her gun and fired. The Doctor saw two men drop before the doors closed fully. He looked down to where Katie was only to see her already going to the Jahra.

"Get on your ships!"

From the swiftly moving people Katie grabbed hold of one of the Jahra, speaking quickly. "Renaldo, I want all of you to stay together, understood? Do not separate. Go to the Krize; I guarantee they'll be watching you anyway. Ask for General Karzon Kilno. Tell him that Trouble vouches for you, and asks him to help on behalf of her friendship with Brigadier Julius Robertson."

"Aren't you coming with us?" Harriet asked as Dickenson and another Jahra also stopped next to Katie. Katie glanced back at the door and the Doctor.

"No," she said firmly. "Don't worry, I'll find a way out, always do."

"Putting your life in the Doctor's hands?" Dickenson asked. It was obvious from Katie's ghost of a smile that he was referring to an earlier conversation.

"Sort of. Now go."

Katie turned and strode back to the door, pulling two hand guns from her belt as she took a stand in front of the doors. The Doctor held his breath as she looked at them for a moment. Her hands tightened around the grips before she tossed them off to the side. The Jahra ships, shields automatically calibrated, flew through the force field that kept the air in and space out. Katie looked over her shoulder at them before giving the Doctor a steady, slightly scared look.

"Doctor, I'm about to do something really stupid and very much not me. I'm going to be very rude about it, but it's going to be very much not me. You'd better be ready to think us out of this."

He smiled and came to stand next to her. "Oh, things never change."

Katie's smile was weak. "Wouldn't that be nice."

The doors to the hangar bay opened. Rahki poured in, guns at the ready. Assavapisitkul came striding in after his soldiers, hair short and stark white, eyes so blue they were nearly colorless. Katie stepped forward slightly, arms spread apart as the Rahki formed a circle around the Doctor and she with the Dictator staring them down.

"Here I am Phil. I surrender." Katie dropped her arms and kept looking Assavapisitkul in the eye. The Dictator seemed puzzled.

"After all that running, you're just going to turn yourself in."

"Yah."

"You're filled with energy that you can control—to a point—and you're surrounded by small ships, and you're surrendering."

"Yah. No tricks. Just me."

Assavapisitkul looked questioningly at Katie. "Why would you do something like that?"

The Doctor could hear the smile in her voice. "Because, Phil, this is worth it."

Assavapisitkul lifted his eyebrows. "And why is that Scorch?"

"Because I've won," Katie said. "Sure, I'm standing here and you look like you wouldn't mind shooting me, but I've won. You set up every second of my life, monitored every word I ever said, but I've beaten your system."

"How so?"

"Every single one of those Jahra, all eighty-two of them, are free. Out of your hands. They aren't numbers anymore, they all have _names_. You've stuffed their heads with all the knowledge you have in your computers and haven't given them a single second of real life, but I—just—did. Me, the one you tried to control and manipulate, the worst Jahra of them all. And I just let them loose on the universe." Katie leaned back slightly. "To quote my old school mates, "In yo face, sucka!""

Assavapisitkul nodded. "I see. You must have found a way to turn off the retrieval circuits then."

"The what?" Katie asked.

"It's a chip," Assavapisitkul said innocently. "We put it in every Jahra we make. Besides you anyway. You had a Reader for that, that rock you were so attached to. Randalls installed a new one in your arm on Kurunathan while he had the chance, but you scrambled that signal." Assavapisitkul reached into one of the pockets on his voluminous white robes, withdrawing a small remote. "I'd have thought you'd know something like that."

Before Katie or the Doctor could twitch, Assavapisitkul pressed a button on the remote. There was a large flash and the Doctor turned with Katie to see the Epsilon-200's all standing in the room, looking incredibly dazed.

"Scorch?" Renaldo started to say. "Why—?"

"Take care of them," Assavapisitkul called out.

On his command, every Rahki in the room started firing at the Jahra. Katie screamed, an angry, broken screech as the Jahra were wiped out in front of her. In a matter of moments, they were just bodies lying on the floor.

The deaths were horrible, a complete waste, but after 900 years of seeing it the Doctor had learned to check on the living first. He looked at Katie.

She was standing completely frozen, hands held in front of her face as she stared in horror and disbelief at the people she had saved not two minutes earlier.

Faster than almost even the Doctor could see, she spun about and lunged for Assavapisitkul. The Doctor caught her by the arms just before she could tear the man to shreds.

"You bastard!" she shrieked at him, among other—far worse—words. "You had me! You had no right! They were new, another species! That was genocide, you son of a bitch!"

"Kathryn," the Doctor said, grunting slightly as he tried to hold her back. "How many more?"

"Just one," she growled back at him, straining to reach Assavapisitkul.

"Kathryn. How—many—more?"

After a tense second Katie stopped struggling and the Doctor let her go. Assavapisitkul smiled ever so lightly before turning away.

"Send someone to clean up the mess, and make a note that the Epsilon-200 Series has been discontinued due to incited rebellion."

* * *

*Constructive crititisim welcome, praise happily accepted, flames not wanted*


	7. Chapter 7

Katie sat silently, fingers pressed to her forehead as she processed everything that she had seen. She and the Doctor were in the back of a hover-craft van, the easiest way to move them through the Rahki ship/planet. The Doctor was also quiet, somehow staring at her and at the wall across from him simultaneously.

"What are you supposed to feel?" Katie asked quietly. The Doctor's eyes focused on her, but otherwise he didn't respond.

"When you see friends die like that, what should you feel?" she asked again, folding her hands together but not looking at the Doctor. When he still said nothing she finally looked at him.

"Doctor, I'm being completely serious about this. What are you supposed to feel?"

"You shouldn't have to be asking that."

"But I am."

"Which you?"

Katie was silent for a moment. "The one that doesn't know what an emotion is."

"You can't feel anymore, can you?"

"Only terror of It." Katie blinked, her eyelids moving slowly in from the sides. "Headache's gone."

"Even your brain structure changed?"

Katie nodded. "All the pathways?" the Doctor confirmed.

"Yeah." Katie stared at her shaking fists. "There's nothing human left. Nothing to hold onto. Nothing of me." She scoffed lightly at herself through her nose. "I just saw eight-two people murdered and I'm thinking about myself. I'm not even angry at Assavapisitkul anymore." Katie inhaled deeply. "I know that that's wrong. I should be infuriated. I should be crying. I should feel _something_."

Katie looked up at the Doctor again. "Please say something."

"What would you want to hear?"

"I don't know. Say that I'm really lying somewhere in a deep coma and this whole thing is a horrible dream. Say that I deserve to be dying in my own body as It takes over. Say that death always brings death and I should have seen the massacre coming. Say that I shouldn't exist and you regret the day I crashed into TARDIS. Say you were right to leave me on Kurunathan and you should have left me here."

"You're right," the Doctor broke in. "I should have."

Katie inhaled deeply and let it out. "Well," she said, her voice thickening. "At least something's still human." She inhaled again. "I think I just felt my heart break."

Neither of them said anything for a minute.

"If you didn't…if you really think that little of me, then why did you...?" Katie shook her head, searching for the words. "Why couldn't you have listened for once and stayed away?" she said, a touch of anger seeping into her voice. "Everything I've done since I've met you has been so that you keep on living, and you had to be the guilt ridden idiot…"

She looked away again and the Doctor spoke quietly.

"I came anyway Kathryn."

There was no answer for a moment. "Why?"

"You asked me to come find you."

"You also told me that you'd always come back for me," Katie said scathingly, "but you didn't. You came for Scorch. You showed up at UNIT because the Krize called you and said that the puzzle was going to be solved. Is that why you picked me up in the first place?" she accused, looking at him again. "Because I was a strange new…_thing_ to figure out?"

"Why are you asking this?"

"Why aren't you answering?" Katie only waited a split second before jumping in again. "I spent two months holed up underneath TORCHWOOD for you, bored to the point of insanity, with no one to speak with but three British lunatics that didn't know what the hell to make of me. I couldn't sleep, didn't eat, and the only contact I had with anyone was for five minutes a day, if that. _You_ stuck me there because I had nowhere else to go after Kurunathan. So tell me the truth for once; why the hell did you pick me up in the first place?"

"Because you needed someone and I wanted to be needed."

Katie laughed humorlessly. "Sounds a lot like the reason I decided to go with you."

"My turn then," the Doctor said. "Why are you asking this?"

"Because I'm a file. I'm a bloody _file_. In my _own brain_," Katie said, stressing the words. "My entire life has been one carefully selected for me to live. I screwed up who knows how many families back on Sol 3, including the one I lived with. I messed up an innocent girl's life because the Rahki decided to make me. A boy is dead so that I can know what it's like to kill someone. I am a mix of who knows how many species so that I can be the perfect traveling mate for you. I have a base program that is this close to taking over my head. So right now, I'm trying to figure out if anything I ever did, felt, or had, was real." She breathed heavily. "Identity crisis taken to the absolute limit."

"You're real Kathryn."

"Shut up Doctor. You've been reciting that same empty phrase since I met you, but we both know it's not true. I was a program, a cover program based off of someone else. I wasn't even an original!"

"You're speaking in past tense."

She smirked. "How sickeningly ironic. You came to save someone who never really existed!"

The Doctor finally moved and crouched in front of her, his eyes forcing her to look at him. "Kathryn, you are real. I need you to fight her."

"What do you think I've been doing?" she asked. "Not that it mattered—matters. Even if she—I, somehow got out of this, I'd just have to go to the Krize anyway. I'm going to die Doctor. You can't save her—me." Katie chewed on her lip for a moment.

"Doctor, if you find a chance to get away, whatever it may be or do to others, take it."

"Only if you can get out too."

"Stop saying things you don't mean!"

"What makes you think that?"

"Because you never said good-bye," Katie whispered. "You never even said good-bye."

"You didn't answer your phone."

"That's a weak excuse and you know it. I'm a bleeding energy swarm, Doctor. I'm not hard to find when you're sharing a planet with me. But you just ran. That was it. You _ran_ from _me_."

"I knew you'd come back into TARDIS and keep traveling if I dropped by."

"Of course. Wash your hands of me. Makes sense."

"Randalls told me that you were nearly done charging temporally," the Doctor tried to explain. "TARDIS is full of temporal energy, and I didn't want to find out what would happen if you finished."

"And you couldn't have told me that?"

"And leave you sitting alone in TORCHWOOD asking yourself all this?"

"She would have been able to handle that better than the questions she did ask herself." Katie's eyes widened for a split second before she closed them.

"And here she comes."

"Kathryn—"

"Oh shut up!" Katie snapped. "You knew this was going to happen. Before the Rahki zapped me off the Krize ship, you told me to fight it. You said that once it started, I needed to fight. You knew this was going to happen, that I was going to have my existence erased by my own body, and you said nothing. Do you know what it's like to lose your mind and know that there's nothing you can do about it?"

"Every day."

Katie looked away from the Doctor, temporarily silent. The Doctor took the opportunity.

"When I found your files on Kurunathan, I immediately thought of a dozen uses for you. I thought about telling you. But I also knew that you'd leave if you did, convinced that you were, by all accounts, a monster. I'd rather have you convinced I'd abandoned you."

"You did. No, I could have answered the phone," Katie corrected herself. "I could have called from TORCHWOOD." She sighed, a heavy sigh full of emotion, like everything she'd felt was locked in the sigh. "I wanted to be saved for once. I wanted to know if I was worth following. I wanted you to follow me and tell me that…that you wouldn't really just leave, that I wasn't Kavrin. I wanted you—not just anyone, but you—to rescue me." She gave him a look. "And you will promptly forget I ever said that."

The Doctor smiled. "See? Still there."

"I hate you sometimes."

"No you don't."

"Yeah, you're right."

"You could have invited me to your wake you know."

"She was trying to avoid this," Katie said wryly, gesturing slightly at the van. She winced. "And there she—I go again."

The Doctor sat back on his heels, not taking his eyes off Katie. She reached up to her necklace and snapped it off, holding it out to him.

"Here. You may as well have this back."

"Why?" the Doctor asked, his voice a little harsh as he recognized the purple crystal.

"It means nothing to me—to her."

After a moment's hesitation, the Doctor took back the necklace. "What happens to you?" he asked, tucking it into his pocket.

"I'm a file. I'll be shoved into a corner and slowly deleted," Katie said matter-of-factly. "Erased and forgotten. I wonder if it'll hurt." Her emotions came back to her eyes for a moment.

"Please say good-bye this time."

"No. I'm getting you out of this."

"Please Doctor."

He stared at her for a moment, his thoughts hidden behind old eyes as always. "Good-bye Kathryn."

"Thank you." Katie paused before speaking again. "You know, I always wanted to donate my body, but I was hoping it would be as a cadaver for a med school rather than have someone move in while I'm watching. Rather disconcerting."

"Can't be particularly pleasant."

"She didn't think so."

The Doctor felt a chill run down his back as Katie didn't correct herself.

* * *

Though he was a firm pacifist, when the van finally stopped the Doctor was very much in a fighting mood. Of course, being the Doctor, this smply set his brain humming at a faster pace than normal, fitting everything that he possibly could together. It was obvious that he would need everything he could get if he had a chance of getting out of this.

Or of recovering Katie.

The doors opened and the Doctor stepped into a large, rectangular room. At the far end a group of five or six Rahki were working around a steeply inclined table that reminded the Doctor of a single person cyber-converter. One wall was full of computers and servers, while the opposite wall seemed to be made of glass. Visible through the glass was an enormous room, nearly ridiculous in size. The far side of the cavernous space held a circular apparatus that the Doctor felt he ought to recognize, but couldn't quite grasp the memory. He was surprised to see TARDIS just sitting on the floor, about fifty yards out from the…whatever it was.

"Impressed?" Assavapisitkul asked.

"A bit," the Doctor admitted. He turned to see where Katie was. She was sitting on the edge of the van, hands folded in her lap as she swung her legs back a forth and glanced around the room with mild interest. She looked for all the world like a child patiently waiting for something they'd expected for years. And why not? the Doctor thought. Katie—or rather, Scorch—had been built for this room.

A Rahki had already approached Katie. The Doctor recognized him as Randalls, the scientist from Kurunathan that had admitted to heading Katie's design team. Randalls was discussing something with her. Deciding to leave it for the moment, the Doctor turned back to Assavapisitkul.

"So what's this big finale you've got set up?"

"You've read everything on her," the Dictator said, leaning back slightly on a railing in front of the glass wall. "Let me hear your theories."

"I'm not here for games."

"You're here for Scorch, and that is what we're going to discus. Further generations will want to know how clever you really were in the end."

Whether he knew it or not, Assavapisitkul had just given the Doctor permission to do what he did best: talk.

"Since we're here for her—" the Doctor jerked her head at Scorch—"let's talk about her. She's got a completely normal, average, human background. Well, except for the parts where she gets into deep trouble selling drugs, shoots her best friend, and then destroys his image to protect herself. Well, that and the fact that she was so brilliant that she had to hold herself back in school to try and avoid the envy of classmates. And of course if things had gone to plan she was supposed to sit and watch as everything she'd ever known was upset and someone else took her life, thus losing her family in the very worst way, though that happened in the end anyway. Kathryn is young, has gone through some of the worst emotional trauma you could devise, carries guilt around like a rock, can never again see her family, is exceptionally brilliant, speaks dozens of languages, and has more quirks than you could comprehend."

The Doctor finally paused for a breath. "In short, you've created my perfect friend. Soul-mate, as one might put it. Considering the fact she was supposed to be eighteen when we met, which for humans is usually when they start searching for a mate, you were hoping that there would be some kind of romantic attraction between us, thus giving me even more reason to spring to her aid when you took her back."

"That's not hard to piece together, Doctor," Assavapisitkul said.

"I'm not finished," the Doctor told him. "I was just giving a recap of who she is." The Doctor looked purposefully back at Randalls. "She'd better still be in there when we're finished here."

Scorch smiled condescendingly. "You're so cute when you're trying to be the hero." She turned back to Randalls, sitting perfectly still as she continued talking to him. The Doctor shifted his attention back to the Dictator.

"As you were saying," Assavapisitkul said dryly.

"Yes. Who she is and what she is are two very different things." The Doctor paused. "She's a key."

Assavapisitkul lifted his eyebrows slightly but said nothing as the Doctor continued. "Well, actually she's a lock pick. Well, more of a battering ram."

The Doctor stood with his weight shifted back slightly as he put his hands in his pants pockets. "I think you're going to un-lock the Time War."

* * *

*Constructive critisisim welcome, praise happily accepted, flames not wanted*


	8. Chapter 8

Assavapisitkul's eyebrows lifted further. The Doctor was hard pressed not to look too smug, certain he had hit on the answer. It wasn't surprising though. He always did.

"Please continue. How did you figure that?"

"I'll admit I didn't at first," the Doctor said, scratching the back of his neck. "When I first ran into her I thought she was a massive battery that was short circuiting. Then I thought she was some kind of a new soldier, but it didn't make sense that a soldier would be on Earth, with a family. Then when the Krize were kicking up such a fuss and you were all so eager to get her back I thought she was some sort of horrifying energy weapon. After all, the universe is a good place to charge her."

The Doctor paused before continuing, the next part a little harder to talk about. "Then I found her files. Well, the file summaries. Took me a minute to sort through the information to get to the heart of it. But going on the fact that you know I was the one to seal the Time War, and that I still have the Moment that did it, you need me safely under observation so that I don't re-seal the War with you inside."

The Doctor held his peace, wondering if Assavapisitkul was going to say anything. Instead, the man was standing silently, as were Randalls and Scorch. The others in the room had lowered their voices even further than before. The floor was very much his.

"Anyway, that explains why you made her who she was. Now, what she is. Your little Scorch Project was set up to fill her with temporal energy. Everything else just gets pulled in as a nice bonus, but you have the greatest concentration of time, excluding TARDIS, stored inside that one girl. If you focus it on one spot, you could rip a hole in anything, especially something time locked."

The Doctor smiled a bit. "Now, here's the fun part; the why. As I'm sure your history teachers have taught you, Dictator, the last time the Rahki had free run of time travel, you made a huge mess of things. Horrible mess, took a very long time and a lot of work to straighten out. Seriously, upsetting fixed points? First rule of time travel is that you don't mess with time. However, if the Rahki become the saviors of Gallifrey, and show how much you've improved and all that you've done over the years, and even turn over the man who locked them in, everything is forgiven and you get your time back, literally. But why stop there? Once the War is unleashed, you might as well become the victors with your marvelous new temporal weapon and end the universe there and then."

The Doctor focused his gaze on Assavapisitkul, waiting for a response.

Assavapisitkul blinked, bit his lip, and frowned as though puzzled. Over by the transport Scorch made a sound similar to a strangled laugh. "How," Assavapisitkul started slowly, "can someone so clever be so utterly wrong?"

"What?"

"Why would we end the universe?" Assavapisitkul said as though it were the most idiotic theory in existence. "We live here as well. Ending the universe would mean ending us. Don't you ever listen to what people say? I'm sure the Krize have mentioned it, since they found out the whole story. We plan to end the _known _universe. We're not destroying anything; we're changing things."

"What?"

Scorch, who had been doing her best to keep her humor in, burst out laughing. It was high-pitched and aggravating, carrying an undercurrent of maliciousness that Katie had never had.

"I'm sorry," Scorch gasped out as all eyes turned to her. "But this is just too funny. Really, it is. I can speak from the Human Program's experience, you've been oblivious before, but on a scale like this?" Her laughter turned abruptly to a smirk. "And you're supposed to be the smart one."

The Doctor noticed Assavapisitkul look at Randalls, and Randalls explained Scorch's words. "Her still rising energy levels are rapidly exposing the information that should have been released with the Last Cycle. She understands her part in all this."

Assavapisitkul smiled lightly before looking back at the Doctor in disgust. "Why would we want to bring back such a pompous, egotistical, corrupt, hypocritical, decaying, over-lording society as the Time Lords? You alone are bad enough; we don't need or want more of you."

"Then what—?"

"Since you're so fond of history," Assavapisitkul interrupted the Doctor, "let's start with that." He started pacing as he spoke, circling the Doctor slowly as he began.

"Two millennia ago in the Rahki's timeline, we were still a small race. We had the basics; faster than light travel, energy transport, interstellar communications. We were working on our reputation as the greatest healers in the known universe, the people who knew the most about medicine and biology and genetics. We had built up just enough of a rapport to be on the list of the great Time Lords, to get invited to the Centennial Ambassador's Meetings, but nothing more. We could look, and wish, but that was all.

"And then we figured out time travel. What a break through! Something set apart for the Time Lords, the race that everyone recognized as the greatest, most brilliant, amazing, powerful people around. Even now, Doctor, when you tell someone that you're a Time Lord, what response do you get?" Assavapisitkul questioned before answering himself. "Even if they have no real idea what that means, they automatically transfer respect to you. You can still use that title for anything you want. A Time Lord was—and still is—everything."

"What of it?" the Doctor said, his tone nearly flat. He wasn't in the mood for reminiscing.

"I'm not finished Doctor," Assavapisitkul said, nowhere near done. "We finally cracked the secret of the vortex, so we used it. We traveled from place to place and time to time, waiting breathlessly for Gallifrey to see that we were worthy of higher standing in their society."

"A bit disgusting, if you think about it," Scorch broke in. "The way we followed you about like attention starved dogs begging for recognition. Still, everyone was doing it so it wasn't out of place. Come to think of it, people still follow you that way. The Human Program certainly did."

The Doctor refused to look at her. Assavapisitkul continued his story.

"Finally you did call us. We were more than ready, sending our finest to appear before you." The Dictator's eyes narrowed, the slight feeling of awe dropping and revealing bitter hatred fueled by a generational grudge.

"And you rebuked us. You scolded us—publicly—on our use of time travel. In front of the full council, members of all the great races in attendance—the Ihu, the Atlantians, the Jazku, even the Krize—you accused us of crimes we knew nothing of before serving us with an ultimatum." Assavapisitkul stopped walking. "Do you remember what you told us?"

"We said that you either find a better way to travel or you would have to stop."

"No Doctor!" Assavapisitkul snapped. "You told us find another way, or you would see to it that we—as a race—would never do anything wrong again. You threatened us with extermination for mistakes that were never explained."

"You were upsetting fixed points!" the Doctor cried out in defense of the Time Lords. "You were told that at the trial! It took years to straighten everything out again! You never paused to think about the flow of history while you were running about it!"

"Granted, we were drunk on the new-found power the travel brought," Assavapisitkul said, holding up a hand, somewhat peaceful before his face hardened again. "But we were also children, Doctor. We knew nothing of time travel except it was reserved for the elite. Fixed points meant nothing to us because we had never heard of them. We were not exposed to the vortex for billions of years as you were. We were young, ready to be taught, but instead you looked down your collective noses and told us to conform or die.

"We learned a lesson that day. A lesson about power, Doctor. It makes you able to do anything, and no one will speak in the defense of the smaller people. Perceived lesser people, no matter how wronged, will be abandoned if the master blows the whistle." The Dictator gave a thin smile. "Or, I suppose in your case, if the Doctor orders the removal of a limb."

A muscle twitched in the Doctor's cheek, but he said nothing. Scorch broke in a second later.

"Stop being so self-righteous Doctor. You lied to your friend that first day; painting the Time Lords as the heroes and the Rahki as the foul, meddling wizards. And then you acted so sorry whenever someone was hurt, so miserable whenever someone died because of you. You were infuriated when she destroyed the Weeping Angels. You never mentioned that you were prepared to order the genocide of a species!" Scorch laughed cruelly. "Oh, what's left of her is reeling from the pain of who you really are."

"You were destroying time itself! The universe was in danger!"

"And you were the forgiven rebel made Lord President of Gallifrey," Scorch responded, now standing, her green eyes challenging the Doctor. "Remember? Your fourth regeneration, with your scarf and your old clothes and your sweets, so innocent and soft. Couldn't let the race who had finally let you back in think you didn't deserve the spot."

"That proves just how much you really know," the Doctor bit out. "The only reason I took the position, the only reason they let me back was because I pandered to their picture of the ideal for the sole purpose of protecting Gallifrey from the two separate invasion forces coming! I was saving my home planet!"

"That only makes it worse for you, Doctor," Scorch told him. "If you were really so amazing as you paint yourself and your work, you would have found some other way to help us."

"The crime still stands! You were killing time!" the Doctor protested. "I made the same choice I always do, as she has seen firsthand, Scorch," the Doctor said, referring to Katie's buried psyche. "It was either one race or all of time. Which would you choose?"

"The lesson to teach, Doctor Man!" Scorch snapped. She missed a beat before continuing and the Doctor smiled ever so slightly at the nickname. "The hardest pill to swallow in all this was the sickening irony of the situation: you, a rouge Time Lord well known for running about time without a care to time itself would lecture us about not following the Laws you so casually ignored."

"Some have to be followed."

"You should have shown us instead of forcing us into the decision we did make," Assavapisitkul broke in. "In the end we did as told and found a new way. Despite the time it takes to grow, program, process, and place each Jahra where they belong, it was a perfectly marvelous system. But rather than the healers we wanted to become, we were now the traitors and destroyers, the ones you feared because they might do anything with the people spread about the universe.

"_Your_ decision left the Rahki drifting alone. Our planet died and no one, not even the Time Lords, came to help us. We were forced to build a new planet. All because the great Gallifreyan race said we were criminals." Assavapisitkul shook his head. "Did you ever really understand the power you had, the power you still have?"

The Doctor didn't answer the question—couldn't answer the question. So he asked his own. "I know this part of the story. How does it end?"

"You left your post and traveled through time," Scorch said neutrally. "Playing with more and more history every second without retribution, but the Council's decision for the Rahki stood, leaving us in the same low position. Imagine the celebration when the power of Gallifrey was challenged and the Last Time War began."

"All the higher races joined," Assavapisitkul said. "Anyone with knowledge of time travel was pulled in to the swirling tides and eddies of war. Everyone but us, the banished killers of the vortex. Gallifrey finally called to us near the end, but we let it alone."

"I always wondered about that. Any reason besides revenge?"

"Every corrupt ruling class falls eventually. Your time had come."

The Doctor again had nothing to say. Hadn't he thought the same in the years preceding the War?

Taking his silence for the agreement it was, Scorch took up the story again, the tale nearly finished. "You can picture the rejoicing when Gallifrey was locked away, sentenced to feel the effects of its gluttony forever. Picture how abruptly that joy ended when it was discovered that the sole survivor of that race was you, the man who put us here. Of all the Time Lords, we wanted you dead and gone the most."

"I can see that, yeah," the Doctor agreed, almost casually. Assavapisitkul gazed levelly—suspiciously—at the Doctor for a moment before continuing.

"Whether or not you saw it at the time, the death of Gallifrey caused an immense shift of power. The gap your planet left is still there. Now that no one was there to be the Vigilantes of Time, or keep tabs on the races with time traveling technology, we knew we might have a chance to create a new name for ourselves.

"However, the universe refused to forget the order you gave. So, we decided to find a way out on our own, a way that no one would argue against."

The Dictator looked the Doctor in the eye. "And thus we decided to take Gallifrey's place."

"What?"

"We would become the new Vigilantes of Time. Take the place of Gallifrey in politics, become the new cultural center, the seat of power. We would become the next great race. And audacious plan, considering where we were, but we were smart enough to do it. But first we had to get rid of you. You were still the Last Time Lord, and one dynasty must be completely eradicated before the new one can begin."

"And thus you started the Scorch Project and made Kathryn so that you could catch me," the Doctor said, his voice a bit tired. "Talking faster would be nice."

"As you wish," Scorch said. "At the very beginning of the Scorch Project, before we had even begun testing, we asked ourselves the why. Why had Gallifrey, of all the planets and all the peoples, become the great Time Lords? What had made them so brilliant and sensitive to the shifts, movements, even the breathing of the vortex?"

"Our exposure to it," the Doctor answered immediately. "We had billions of years with the vortex leeching into our collective DNA." His eyes widened and he looked at Assavapisitkul.

"You aren't."

"We are."

"Are you insane?"

"We have been planning this for a thousand years."

"But…but you can't!" the Doctor sputtered. "You can't just create an Un-Tempered Schism!"

* * *

*Constructive critisisim welcome, praise happily accepted, flames not wanted*


	9. Chapter 9

"We can."

"But…but a schism it—it—it's a gap in reality!" the Doctor said, still trying to wrap his mind around this crazy idea that the Rahki had. "You can't…it's not like opening a door, or—or even opening a time corridor! You'd be ripping a hole in the vortex itself! Opening one requires more time energy than you could possibly gather and an incredible amount of control! And that's just a normal schism! An un-tempered one takes even more stabilizing and the power it gives out has to go someplace and it takes in everything nearby just trying to heal!"

"You think we haven't considered all that?" Assavapisitkul said coolly, eyebrows raised.

"Even considering doing something like this is…it's insane!"

The Doctor heard Scorch give a heavy sigh and he turned to her. She was shaking her head at him. "You still really don't get it, do you?" she said in a tone of mocking wonder. Her laugh was short and disbelieving. "I travel with you for so long, you read the files, you even try sleuthing out the answer for yourself after you leave the Human Program, and you still don't understand what I am."

Scorch smiled lightly. "I'm not just a battering ram Doctor. If that's all we wanted, I could have charged here and we would have just used one of the people you continuously pick up to bring you in. It would have been so much easier that way, but we had to be certain that the Schism wouldn't consume us while it sought to heal itself. Think hard now, because you just said it; how did the Time Lords fall into sync with time in the way they did?"

"The Schism."

Scorch sighed. "Apparently you weren't listening to yourself. Let's try again. What have I had leeching into me for the past year?"

"Energy."

"You are extremely slow Doctor M—" Scorch cut herself off before she could use the nickname. The Doctor felt the smallest spark of pleasure that a remnant of Katie was still in there somewhere, trying to fight her way out. But Scorch was the dominant personality, and she spoke again.

"For being the renowned Doctor, you really are rather stupid. I've been in a time ship! In the middle of the vortex! When I wasn't traveling with you, I've been living on top of a Rift that cut through temporal space. I've been constantly exposed to, and welcomed, the vortex's power into my head. I'm a giant control circuit! Not only will we be able to use me to open a schism, but my mind is perfectly set up as a control center. I'm already wired to be a living computer; your DNA—which I otherwise would _not_ have wanted—as part of my genetic code only helps me to sync up with the vortex. I will make certain that our Un-Tempered Schism does not destroy us."

The Doctor thought about that for a beat. "Does that mean you'll be strapped into that board" –he gestured to the wired table at the end of the room—"for the rest of your life?"

"Of course," Assavapisitkul said. "You can't leave a Schism unattended."

"I wasn't talking to you," the Doctor said tightly before speaking to Scorch. "Are you really okay with that?"

Scorch shrugged. "Why wouldn't I be? It's the reason I was made." A slow smile spread across her face. "And…and I'll be looking directly into the vortex. I'll be able to see everything and everywhen. Just like an authentic Gallifreyan, but better." She looked off to the side, musing. "I think my first step will be to direct the tear to Beriin. I have the precise date, so I can make sure you and the Human Program land on the planet. Then we'll be certain that Jahra Delta-009 is able to get your TARDIS Key to us, and one thing to the next will get all of us here. Time stays ordered, the Rahki take their place as the new Gallifrey, and in the end you die to make everything official."

Scorch pressed her lips together and closed her eyes as though in momentary pain. When she reopened her eyes, she looked accusingly at Randalls, who was back by the control board.

"How strong did you make the Human Program's protection urge?"

"Is something wrong with it?" Randalls asked, genuinely curious.

"Would I be asking otherwise?" Scorch snipped at him. "The particle of her that's left is still trying to get out. How permanent was she supposed to be?"

Randalls replied as Scorch crossed over to him, his voice dropping as she neared, but not enough for the Doctor to miss out on the answer.

"Remember, your Last Cycle wasn't activated. It's technically supposed to be running the body right now. Don't worry; it'll take a dash longer, but it'll be deleted." He turned back to the board. "We're almost done here. You'd better make sure the Doctor's asked all his questions. We wouldn't want to miss anything for the records."

"Good, because I do want to ask Scorch something," the Doctor broke in. "You have all of Kathryn's memories, yes?"

"They're on file."

"And all the things she's gone through, all the stuff she's learned and thought…"

"It's on file."

"Does it mix with your programing?"

"Because the Last Cycle was missed and she's still there, yes." Scorch gave him a look. "Why?"

"Do you actually agree with what the Rahki are doing?"

Scorch stayed silent, and a small spark of hope jumped up in the Doctor's hearts. Maybe he could still stop this.

"Think about it. How much—?"

Scorch held up a hand. "Doctor, we frankly don't have time for any last minute speeches, and nothing you say will change anything. The question I have for you is this: why shouldn't the Rahki have the chance Gallifrey did? What's wrong with us trying to become a new center, to fill the gap you left behind? Why are you really fighting this?"

The Doctor stood still as Scorch started walking towards him, questioning him like an expert debater. "Are you scared for you own life? All things must end. Are you worried about your friend? She was never real, and even if she had been she's now lost to you. Are you thinking of the 'good' name of Gallifrey? That was lost to your race ages ago. Are you worried about the universe you'll leave behind, supposedly defenseless? The Rahki will guard time and history, shape it as it needs to be. Are you—?"

"Hold a moment." The Doctor held up his own hand. "Back up a sentence. Where did the Rahki shaping history come into all this?"

All the Rahki in the room flashed Scorch a look, who assumed a peeved expression before glaring at Randall. "I blame you for this," she snapped. "If you'd done your job on Kurunathan, the Human Program wouldn't even be around to hear the conversation, much less affect my speech."

"Haven't even finished your take-over and the power's already gone to your head." The Doctor turned to Assavapisitkul, not showing his feelings at the evidence something of Katie was still scrabbling around Scorch's head someplace. "No wonder you've been saying the known universe will end," the Doctor continued. "What changes do you have on your list?"

"A shift in politics always causes…disturbances." Assavapisitkul seemed unbothered by his implications. "We're simply going to make sure it occurs smoothly."

"Meaning anyone that speaks against you is annihilated."

"Removed," Scorch said smoothly. "The only ones who would speak against us would be the ones that crawled to Gallifrey for billions of years and are loathe to relinquish any shreds of power the dead alliance still carries. However, if you're dead, they have no one to run to for help. So, we open an Un-Tempered Schism, you die, and the universe continues to turn. It'll simply turn the way we believe it should. Isn't that how Gallifrey did it?"

"Speaking of which," Randalls cut in. "We're ready for you."

"Finally."

The Doctor tilted his head, curious with disbelief. Despite the potential reign of terror the Rahki were about to start, his mind couldn't help but marvel.

"I can't quite accept that any part of Kathryn's mind mingled with you."

Scorch half-turned back to him and raised an eyebrow. "I'm more like the Human Program than you think. I simply know my importance. She never could accept hers. It's a shame. She could have done a lot more, given the time and support." Scorch shrugged. "Oh well, too late now."

"Is it? Do you really think this is right?" the Doctor called to her, desperation starting to tinge his voice. Scorch ignored him as she stepped up to and lay back on the board that had been waiting for her for so long. Randalls answered for her.

"Doctor, you've lost. Appealing to a dead friend is pathetic."

"She seemed healthy enough a moment ago."

"Then hope that it has finished dying. Would you really want it alive for this?"

Once again, the Doctor didn't answer. Glancing around, it was easy to see that no amount of cleverness would talk him out of this, and no amount of running would get him to the multitude of computers that would help spark the process.

There was always a way out. Always. There had to be. He didn't lose. He'd always won before. He'd always saved his friend and the universe. At the end of the day they got home safely.

Had he really failed?

"Watch Doctor," Assavapisitkul said simply but forcefully. He gestured at the clear glass wall without really moving. "See what caution and time give you."

The Doctor had no real choice but to stare silently, his senses dulled yet somehow sharpened. The large apparatus at the end of the enormous room called up memories of his initiation from when he was eight, nearly nine hundred years ago. Recollections of the terror he felt, the inspired madness—maddening inspiration?—that he had gleaned from it afterwards leeching from him now when he needed it most. Would his second time staring into the whole of time be any different? Would it be worse? What would come of it when the whole Rahki race looked into the vortex?

He went cold with the thought as sparks started to form along the inside of the large circle. An entire planet, either going mad, running, or becoming heroes in seconds? It would be chaos in its purest form. How to stop it? He thought about warning Assavapisitkul, but his mind took in the sight of the circle, crackling blue artron energy mixing with a silver scar hovering in the center, and he knew that it would happen. A cascade effect if nothing else. There was nothing to stop it now.

With luck, the ensuing disaster would give him a chance to get away and hopefully find a way to fix everything.

The Doctor glanced away from the large apparatus, and looked over to Scorch—Katie?—lying on her board.

There were thin tubes inserted into her arms and abdomen as if to draw blood, but instead colors were flowing through them. All but the silver time was sent off to somewhere else in the ship, while the liquid eternity was pulled towards what would soon become an Un-Tempered Schism. The Rahki scientists had just finished placing a cap made completely of wires around her head, the circuits latching onto her skull and from there into her brain. Her lips were moving and Randalls, listening, repeated the words in a louder voice.

"Temporal strain increasing. Vortex wall wearing thin. Schism open in five…four…three…two…"

There was no sound as the silver scar spilt in two, the swirling emptiness of time revealed in a great, angry, purple storm. The Doctor turned abruptly to the side, waiting for the pandemonium to begin.

After a few moments of silence, he looked around. The Rahki were all lined up near the glass, watching this historic moment for their race, but they didn't seem affected the way the Doctor had anticipated.

His curiosity got the better of him and he looked as well, hearts in his throat. The Un-Tempered Schism was still there, like an ugly bruise on the forehead of time. He could feel the song of the vortex rushing through his blood, but that too was dulled. Peering closer, he noticed what seemed to be a sheer silver curtain over the mouth of the Schism. His question was answered a moment later by Randalls' voice.

"The Control Circuit is using the energy put out by the Schism to temporarily dampen the effects of the vortex. It might hold for an hour. We have to clear the area and set up the visual guards before the shield drops."

"Explains why you haven't all lost it," the Doctor mused. Assavapisitkul, like the others, seemed slightly dazed but quietly ecstatic. The Dictator smiled like a proud parent as he went to look at Scorch.

"Isn't she fantastic?" he asked the Doctor. "All due to the proper upbringing. Still, now your part is finished." He lifted a hand and the Doctor was suddenly pushed to his knees. A weapon started to charge by his ear as the answer finally came to him. Well, not really an answer, but a chance. Not even a proper chance. A hope, and only if Katie had managed to survive this long. Only if she wasn't dead yet.

"Just, one question. One very, very last question, and I'll die happy." The Doctor paused. Assavapisitkul looked fairly bored, but motioned for him to continue.

"Why that family?"

"What?"

"Why the O'Conner's on Earth?" the Doctor clarified. "What made them a good family?"

Assavapisitkul shared a look with Randalls before answering, obviously thinking it a stupid last question. "They were a family. Out of the way, ordinary, decently intelligent. Just a family."

"There was nothing special that made them better than anyone else on Earth?" the Doctor pressed. "Out of the millions of families in that decade alone, there was nothing to make them _the_ family for Scorch? No ties to future greats, no historical ancestors…nothing?"

Assavapisitkul's face was a mix of hatred and disgust, but mostly disbelief. "There was nothing special about them. If it had backfired, we could have thrown them out and started over. They were worthless and had no impact whatsoever on their surroundings."

An irate, female voice with a heavy Southern accent cut across Assavapisitkul's words.

"You care to repeat that?"

* * *

*Constructive critisisim welcome, praise happily accepted, flames not wanted*


	10. Chapter 10

The Doctor held his breath. Would the personality war hold?

Assavapisitkul looked down at his prized possession, confused. "What could it possibly matter to you what importance that family held?"

"I lived with them, Phil," Katie said, biting out the nickname like the insult it was. She opened her eyes and flicked a glance at him, otherwise not moving. "And I have a few problems with what you just said about _my_ family." Katie paused without really pausing. "I've got several problems with you in general, but I would have left it alone until two seconds ago."

"What are you talking about?"

"Wow. You're slower than the Doctor is sometimes," Katie said. "Or maybe you just hate admitting it when something you did doesn't work. Another thing he can never do gracefully." Katie smiled thinly. "Your precious Scorch is back where she belongs, Phil. Laid quietly away like the subroutine she is, in a place where I have complete supervision. And don't go calling your scientists," Katie snapped as Assavapisitkul motioned to Randalls. "You've gone and wired me in to your computer system, stupid. No way back now, unless you want that…_thing_ you've opened to eat your ship."

Katie closed her eyes again and as the Doctor recognized her "concentration" face, he realized why she hadn't started extricating herself from the energy siphons and the wire cap; as the "Human Program" she wasn't supposed to be the one controlling the Schism. If she wasn't careful, things would quickly go from very bad to even worse.

"Now that everyone in the room is on edge," Katie said, her voice calm (which scared the Doctor more than her irritated tones ever had) "how about we start removing distractions? I want whoever's pointing a gun at the Doctor to please, step backwards carefully and lower your gun."

"Give control back over to Scorch," Assavapisitkul hissed at Katie. "Don't be so foolish."

She opened one green eye at him. "My life, my brain, my body. It's your own fault for putting us in this situation, so why don't you shut up while I try to keep us all alive?" She closed her eye again and the Doctor felt rather than saw the Rahki guard step away from him. He started to stand.

"Don't move fly-boy," Katie said, still immobile, but he could hear the look she wanted to give him. "I'm seeing a little too much right now, and the less movement the better. Thank you."

The room was silent for a minute before Katie spoke again. "Okay. Next step. Assavapisitkul, I am very much in a "what the hell?" angry mood from the slaughter of the Epsilon-200 series. However, since I can't wring your fat neck without killing all of us, and I know you couldn't care less about it anyway, we'll move on. But I still don't want to talk to you yet."

She paused again, twitching slightly as she tried to keep Scorch working only as a subroutine rather than taking over her mind. "Randalls, could you kindly explain how this crazy apparatus that I'm attached to works? In very simple terms."

"The tubes extract the energy," Randalls started in. "Since we only need the temporal power, everything else is simply sent off to the planet's engines."

"Glad to hear it," Katie commented. "Kindly—carefully—get those particular useless bits out of me."

Randalls did as Katie requested, leaving two of the clear tubes, both with silver in them, behind.

"I feel strangely like a filter…reason?"

"You take in the temporal energy from the Schism and also put it out. You are controlling it after all."

"I see. What does it run through before getting to me?"

"A buffer system. It has a very temporary holding tank for safety's sake."

"Good. That will hold it long enough."

Randalls seemed puzzled. "Long enough for?"

"I'm not staying attached to this thing for the rest of my days," Katie said, obviously wanting to sound far more sarcastic than she did. "I'm going to transfer the control over to the computers. Don't get your coat-tails in a knot; they'll last long enough for the Doctor and me to close your Schism. And then he and I are going to have a small talk about pushing people's buttons and trying to be a hero while leaving people stranded."

"Well that's something to look forward to," the Doctor said wryly.

Katie opened her eyes and looked at him. "You're not supposed to enjoy it." She gave a quick wink before shutting her eyes again.

"Sooner we can do this the better, so shake a leg."

Ignoring the glowering, but silent, Dictator, Randalls and the other Rahki scientists busied themselves obeying Katie for a bit before very, very carefully removing the last two tubes from her body. Now the only thing left was the wire cap that kept her in control of the Schism.

"Randalls, last question," Katie said, still lying flat. "Why am I seeing two different images and hearing two separate things?"

"Because you're in two places," the Doctor interrupted, understanding better than the others. "Most of your mind is inside the vortex. You aren't really looking into as much as part of it."

"21st century Earth language Doctor. I can't spare a lot of thought to your ramblings."

"Rude. Think of the vortex as…as the internet. Part of you—most of you—is a piece of information in the vortex, like a computer virus. You can go anywhere and break into anywhen, and that's what that part of your mind is doing. The small portion left is outside the vortex, like looking at the computer screen."

"Ah."

Using slow, careful movements, Katie sat up, obviously keeping her focus mostly on the Schism control. Sitting cross-legged on the sloped board, she turned towards Assavapisitkul. She looked at him for a moment. "You got a family?" she asked abruptly.

"I had parents, if that's what you're asking."

"No, it's not. Do you have a family?"

"I have relations, or did before their lifespans ended."

"Relations," Katie repeated. "Translation being you never had much of a bond with—touch that computer and I will let that Schism loose!"

Randalls backed up from the keyboard. Katie let her gaze slide over to him. "I'm multi-tasking right now, and safely getting myself out of your systems is hard enough without interference. So back off." She looked back to Assavapisitkul.

"I'm going to very carefully explain something to you: I had no relations. No, I take that back. I had two great aunts that I didn't like. Those were relations. But I had a huge, rowdy, embarrassing, sometimes messy, close, marvelous _family_. We weren't fancy. We may not have had grand names in our family shrub, but I will tell you this right now; those people—_my_ people—touched lives. I couldn't care less about our bloodlines. _My_ _family_ meant something."

Assavapisitkul, a credit to his social status, simply raised an eyebrow. "I threaten the Doctor's life, I have you create a gap in reality, and I order the deaths of a hundred people you just saved, and you do absolutely nothing…but a few less-than-kind comments about a group of people that belong to a girl _you_ replaced gives you enough strength to break through the stranglehold on your mind and fight back?"

"Now I know you don't have a family," Katie said, almost sad. She seemed to forget anyone else was in the room for a few moments while she spoke.

"Granted, I wasn't really related to them, and I've been telling myself ever since I crashed into the Doctor that I had no family, but you know what? Screw—that. I don't care that they didn't birth me; they bred me, and all I have is from them. Whatever gunk you've stuffed into my head isn't worth a thing, because they taught me. That family—my family—loved me, and I love them, because they are the ones who raised me. Not your programing. _They_ raised me."

Katie's voice dropped an octave even as the danger level in it rose. "And if I'm really honest, you could kill millions, and while I would be devastated at the loss of life, they wouldn't mean much to me. You could rip the vortex in half, but as long as I was physically unharmed, go ahead. You could shoot the Doctor, and I would cry, but survive. But don't you _dare,_ call my family worthless, because they are mine, and I will go to my grave protecting them."

Katie, still sitting cross-legged on the board, looked at Assavapisitkul. Her eyes held the coldest, most dangerous look the Doctor had ever seen. Not breaking eye contact, she reached up and peeled the cap off of her head, the wires now dangling uselessly.

"I'll give you this one chance. Just the one, and I've only got the strength for the one because of who they taught me to be. Run."

The few Rahki that hadn't left during her speech broke and took off. Assavapisitkul took an extra half-second before joining them.

The Doctor was up on his feet in an instant and over by Katie. She slid off the board and hugged him in relief letting out a sigh.

"You alright?"

"Never diss a gal's family. Otherwise, I'll live."

The Doctor chuckled, then looked down when Katie pulled away slightly. She was frowning.

"What?"

"I still feel like there's something extremely important that I've forgotten."

The Doctor didn't bother to stop his laugh. "Kathryn, I don't care what you say; you are extremely human."

She grinned cheekily up at him. "Jealous?"

Alarms started blaring, breaking the moment. Running to the computers, the Doctor started looking for the problem.

The Doctor started talking as he usually did. "You didn't extract yourself correctly; the program wasn't fully transferred and stabilized before you broke your connection. The Schism's—"

"Un-buffered and growing."

"Yes, how did—" The Doctor cut off his own sentence as he turned back to Katie. "Ah."

She gave a tight smile and wiggled her fingers at him, punctuating the dull, multi-colored, almost sticky glow that covered her skin. "Tickles," she mused. "Also means that nothing's controlling the Schism, and I can hear it screaming in my head."

"Yeah, same here."

"Doctor, we're screwed."

"There has to be something. There's always something," the Doctor said as he dashed back to the computers, searching for anything that could close the Schism before it grew large enough to consume time.

"Are you feeling and seeing the same thing I am?" Katie asked him incredulously. "The most we can hope for is to get out and clean up the mess later! That thing could eat TARDIS!"

The Doctor froze and turned to Katie. "Say that again."

"Doctor, that Schism could eat…" She gasped as she caught his drift. "Oh!" She thought for a moment. "Oh."

"It would work."

"She's going to hurt for a bit. It might even kill her."

"We'll have to risk it."

"Here's to hoping."

Katie and the Doctor dashed out the door and ran down the hallway, striving to get to the schism before it got too big. TARDIS was nearby the schism, and though it would take a lot—possibly everything—out of the old girl, she might have enough time energy in her to close the gap. The Schism had to be filled until it could hold no more, and only a TARDIS had anything like enough power.

They rounded the corner, fairly flying as they sped along. Katie was half a step behind the Doctor when she saw him.

"Doctor!" she screamed, leaping forward and shoving him as the sound of a gun going off echoed around them. The Doctor looked back at Katie as he stood.

She was bent over slightly, holding a hand to her side as she locked eyes with Assavapisitkul. His eyes were blazing with hatred and loss, hers filled with bitter victory.

"I told you to run." Katie sounded almost sad.

"We worked for a thousand years on you!" he shouted, sounding hurt and defeated. "You were the perfect creation, something designed with the greatest care! Failure was never an option, and now you would have us torn down _again_ while he continues? Would you have us erased like his people were?"

Assavapisitkul lifted his gun again, but instead of shooting the Doctor he fired at Katie. And again. And again.

"Doctor, go close the Schism. I'll be there in a minute."

The Doctor looked between her calm mask and Assavapisitkul's face full of…was it self-loathing? Whatever it was, the tears in the man's eyes were ones of failure. The Doctor did as Katie asked, despite the four holes in her body. She'd come back from a bullet to the head before; this would be nothing.

Katie locked eyes with Assavapisitkul. The wordless conversation shouted volumes.

"You've lost, Assavapisitkul," she said quietly after a minute. "When you could have done…everything."

"I know," he said hoarsely. Before Katie could stop him, he put the barrel of the handgun in his mouth and fired.

Katie watched his body crumble before going off after the Doctor.

* * *

The Doctor was already inside TARDIS, the ever growing, screaming schism just outside. He grabbed hold of two handles on either side of one of the console panels.

"Sorry Old Girl," he apologized as he prepared to pull it off.

"That's not going to do any good," Katie said from the doorway, her voice slightly raspy. The Doctor turned to face her, but she was already crouched down beside him, pulling up one of the floor grates and jumping down among the wires.

She searched for a few moments before turning up to him. His eyes widened as he saw her too-pale face and blood-covered shirt.

"Which one of these is her main power line?" When the Doctor hesitated, Katie snapped at him. "While time still exists Doctor!"

"Large one, second out from the center."

Katie turned around and latched onto the seal, trying to turn the large ring.

"Kathryn, that's not—"

"Doctor, you may be the most amazing man in the universe," Katie interrupted, "but you know squat about how energy works. That Schism is more than a reality gap; it's a wound on the side of the vortex! The heart of TARDIS isn't going to do us any good. We need the pure temporal energy that she's got flowing in her veins; it'll act like a salve. Anything else will make the gash bigger until all of time is torn open." She stared at him desperately. "Please, trust me on this!"

The Doctor stared at her a moment longer before tossing her the sonic. "Use that! I'll get some extra cables."

Katie immediately set to work, and by the time the Doctor had returned with cable extensions, Katie was holding the power cable in place, silver light forcing its way out of the loosened seal. It seemed to flow down Katie's arms before disappearing as she absorbed it. Her color was coming back.

Taking the end of the cable the Doctor handed her, she quickly pulled the main power line away from its connection and slammed the two ends together. Using the sonic, she fused the ends before pulling herself out from the mess of wires. Stumbling slightly, she got to the other end of the cable as thick silver water began pouring from it. The Doctor started to move to help her.

"Don't you dare touch this end!" she snapped at him. "It's pure time Doctor! All the Time Lord DNA on Gallifrey isn't going to do you any good against it!"

The Doctor grabbed the cable further down from the end and helped her pull it out of the front door.

The Schism had grown again, nearly the size of the cavernous room. The sight terrified the Doctor. TARDIS was just one ship; how could she possibly have enough time to fill the gap?

"Kathryn, drop your end!"

"No!"

"Kathryn, I need to try—"

"No!"

The intensity in her voice was startling, as was the shadow of fear on her face. It passed as she put even more effort into moving towards the schism.

In her haste, Katie didn't notice the cable twist itself around her feet until she tripped over it. The end of the cable flew from her hand, the temporal energy streaking for the schism like a silver river. Katie stumbled as she got up again, not seeming to notice the silver wisping off of her own skin.

"Kathryn get back!"

"Doctor—"

"Kathryn, the Schism's draining the energy straight from you!"

"Let it!"

She glanced at him, hesitating, then picked the cable back up, walking as quickly as she could to the Schism before tripping again. The silver flowed from her even faster than before, trickling rather than wisping. The time mixed with the blood still seeping from the bullet holes in her chest.

Katie moved to get up, but as she lifted her head she froze, transfixed by the sights she saw in the Schism. The silver continued to pour from her as she started to shake.

"There's too much," she forced out, her voice hoarse. "I can't see anything."

The Schism was still growing, the silver from TARDIS still running from the tube. But it had slowed, even as the silver coming from Katie poured out faster and started mixing with other colors. The Schism wasn't taking only her time; it was taking the rest of her too. Even her mind, so recently reclaimed, was being drained. The Vortex was about to consume her, and she couldn't move.

The Doctor dashed for the end of the cable, the flow of time weak but continuous. Bending down, he grabbed it midstride.

The time energy hit him like liquid fire. The Doctor could feel the silver power latch directly on to his blood, spreading through his body. He felt empowered and as though he was melting. He was both a lightning bolt and a flaming tree. Living and dying in the same moment, a never ending regeneration that was already driving him mad.

The spilt second it took him to drop the cable was far too long. The Doctor gasped deeply, reeling from his momentary exposure. Katie was still frozen in place, but she had to be the one to move the cable, and before the Schism sucked her dry. The Doctor dropped down next to her.

"Kathryn, I need you to look away. Can you hear me? I need you to stop."

"I can't." The words were barely a whisper.

"What are you seeing?"

"Gallifrey," she said as though the words were being pulled from her. "The War. It's killing me. I can't stop dying." Her voice was little more than a whimper. "Help me Doctor. Please, help."

He never could resist those words.

Always one to ignore the personal danger, the Doctor straightened and turned back to the power cable. The molten eternity had increased in pressure, TARDIS giving all she had. Getting another running start, he latched onto the end of it. The power was greater, more agonizing than before, but he didn't focus on that. Instead he looked into the Vortex for the second time in his long life.

Terrified as when he was when he was eight, his years of travel having done nothing to quell the urge to run, he still couldn't ignore his friend's plea. Forcing himself towards the danger, he was now balancing on the edge of the Un-Tempered Schism. He could hear the tormented wails of the Vortex as it tried to heal itself, grabbing at anything it could use and only making the wound greater. Another two seconds and it would consume him, Katie, the Rahki ship, and never stop.

Grabbing the cable end with both hands, he shoved it into the Schism. It screeched all the louder and TARDIS screamed while her life was stolen by the ocean she traversed. The Doctor could feel the Vortex enveloping him as the gap closed.

He shut his eyes, swayed, and fell.

* * *

*Constructive critisisim welcome, praise happily accepted, flames not wanted*


	11. Chapter 11

The Doctor blinked, everything fuzzy for a moment. Hadn't he just finished his Initiation? Why then did he feel so old? Was it because he ran? No, others had run before. That wasn't the problem. Maybe it was because now he needed a name. Everyone had to pick a name after Initiation. No, he had a name. He was the Doctor, a man who tried to heal. That's right; he had just healed time. Not too shabby, considering.

The Doctor got up off the floor, breathing heavily as he looked around at the now empty room. The Schism was closed, and wouldn't open again. Debris was everywhere. The Doctor listened for a moment, holding still as he tried to feel for anyone. He heard no voices, felt no one else. Had the Rahki been taken by the Vortex? If so, they were gone now. All gone, nothing left of the entire race. There might not even be a memory save this ship. Was it still genocide if they never existed, or was it something worse?

Out of the corner of his eye he saw a faint glow coming out of TARDIS. The area must be full of residual energies now, and it worked wonderfully as a power source. She would be all right soon. A full recovery.

The Doctor's hearts skipped and he spun about on his heel, trying to spy Katie. When he didn't see her he started to take off down the hall.

"Fly-boy."

Doing an abrupt about face that nearly made him fall over, he saw Katie leaning against the side of TARDIS. Her bright green eyes were open, and a small smile on her face.

"Glad you heard me." Her voice was low. "Hate to leave without a goodbye." Her eyes snapped shut as her breath started coming in short bursts, pain lines all over her face, body radiating tension.

The Doctor moved slowly, feeling his age as he knelt down next to Katie, the always present analytical part of his mind taking in everything. The blood soaked clothes that had ragged holes exposing what was happening to her body. The gaping holes in her flesh.

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

"I'm not."

The Doctor tried to take Katie's hand but she pulled away, hissing in pain as she did.

"No. Don't—don't touch me. Assavapisitkul didn't shoot me—with bullets. He used Byxzine pellets. Remember that from—our first real trip? With the banshee? And—and the dullahan?"

"Can't forget Mr. Dixon now," the Doctor said teasingly. "I know how much you loved him."

Katie's lips twitched in a smile before she became serious again. "It eats any organic thing—it comes across. Can't have you—getting eaten now can we? I can't heal—fast enough to beat it. No energy left to beat it. Just enough to fight. Go down with a fight. Very me."

Katie's attempt at a smile only became a grimace. She opened her eyes and fixed them on the Doctor's face. "At least I won't—cause any more problems."

"You were never a problem Kathryn."

"Yes I was. I ruined—Gina's life. Everything that—happened to her. My fault. All those people I've killed. My fault. All the damage I've done—so much damage. My fault. Your pain. My fault."

"Stop tying it all to me."

"Can't help it. Everything makes it—back to you in the end." Katie made a sound that was somewhat similar to a laugh, distorted by the agony she was in as the acid slowly consumed her.

"Doctor—I finally remembered—what was so important."

"What was it Kathryn?"

"Today—today I turned sixteen."

The Doctor felt as though she had ripped his hearts from his chest. He drew a hand down his face, wanting desperately to hold her yet knowing he couldn't. He couldn't have cared less about the acid reaching him, but right now it would only cause her more pain.

Sixteen. She was much too young for this. For all of it. She'd been right back in the hanger bay; in so many ways, she was very old. Too old rather than too young. She should be back on Earth with her family and friends, planning her future, living. Anything instead of dying, separated from all she had known and loved after living in physical and emotional isolation for so long.

"Doctor—did you know that—that you're really—rather marvelous?"

"And you are magnificent."

"No I'm not. I'm just—just Kathryn. Just a problem. You won't have to worry—about me anymore. Trouble is my middle name. Trouble Moore, Moore Trouble. Gave it to myself. Fitting—don't you think?"

The Doctor blinked against the tears threatening to spill over. Katie's gaze was still fixed on his face as she struggled to breathe. He felt like he should say something, but what was there to say?

"Tell me about your family."

"Gina's," she corrected out of habit. "No, mine." Katie seemed confused. "Right?" Her eyes misted over suddenly and her voice shook. "Doctor—what am I? Who—who am I? I don't—I don't know. I don't have anyone. I didn't—come from anywhere. I was—I was nothing more than—than a program."

"You're Kathryn T. Moore, the girl who saved the universe."

"I almost—almost killed it. I—I'm a thing." A few tears escaped, rolling down her face. "Doctor they didn't—they didn't even know I was gone. I'm dying—and they don't—even know that I left home." Katie closed her eyes for a brief moment, the pain on her face no longer physical. She opened her eyes again, and he easily recognized the longing in them. "Doctor, I want to go home."

The Doctor was silent for a moment, trying desperately to find something comforting to say. "You and Gina were still two separate people. I think that your family, however subconsciously, noticed that you weren't there, and I think that they did miss you."

Katie gave a gurgling laugh that hurt the Doctor's throat to hear. "Did anyone ever—ever tell you that you suck—at touchy-feely stuff?"

The Doctor choked out a laugh that was mostly a sob. "Not quite in that way before, but sort of, yeah."

Katie contracted suddenly, making a sound between a gasp and a scream. She breathed for a few seconds before relaxing just slightly.

"Stupid—spinal column. Too many—nerves." She looked back at the Doctor's face. There was fear in her eyes.

"Doctor—I'm scared. I'm so scared. No one—even knows—I existed. There'll be nothing left."

"I'll remember."

"One year—out of nine hundred—and three years—isn't much to remember. No. Damn Cardiff Rift—stole four months—of my running—and then I walked off—for two months—so really—only six months." Katie blinked, sending more tears down her face. "I was going to live—with you forever. And now—no one will even—remember I lived—at all."

"I remember everyone."

"Just another red-head."

"No. No, you are so much more than that Kathryn Moore. You are so much more than just another face. You are brilliant and amazing and so alive." The Doctor swallowed hard to keep his voice clear and steady. "Do you remember when we met?"

"Yes," she said, keeping her eyes glued to the Doctor's face.

"So do I. And I am never going to forget."

"Do you promise?"

"Yes Kathryn. I promise."

Katie stared at him a second longer before her gaze suddenly lost its fixedness. "Doctor—I can't see. I can't see anything." Tears started running down her face again; ones of pure pain and fear. "Don't leave me! Please—please don't leave. I don't want to be alone."

"I'm right here Kathryn. I will never leave you alone. I will always find you, and I will always come back for you."

Katie tried to take a breath but it didn't work.

"Did I ever tell you about Gallifrey?" the Doctor suddenly asked before plunging into the description. "The sky was a burnt orange. There were two suns. The second one would rise in the South, and the silver trees would catch the light and make it look like a forest on fire.

"I lived as part of the House of Lungbarrow on Mount Cadon. I used to climb it all the time. The Cadonflood River flowed nearby, a rushing torrent of the clearest water in the universe. There was a great stone bridge that crossed it in one place, and you could stand there and feel the water spray hitting your face, the stone rumbling under your feet until you feared you would fall right through into the water.

"The capital was made up of gorgeous silver towers rising between snow covered mountains, the whole thing encased inside a dome of glass. People constantly moving through the streets, discovering and sharing and living. Oh, and the words! Beautiful words, the most magnificent words. Words that could raise empires and burn stars. Oh Kathryn, you should have heard it. Such a language, such wonderful words. You could do anything with words like that."

The Doctor looked at the dust that used to be Katie. He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth, stifling the sobs that finally came.

* * *

The Doctor moved into the TARDIS. It couldn't really be called walking. It was more like an upright crawl. Or maybe a slither. A slither for the snake. Another one dead. Another one gone. Another one vanished because it kept him alive.

Sixteen! A number he would forever hate. Sixteen years old! Sixteen!

The mourning of TARDIS filtered in through his fogged mind. Not mourning because he was, but because the TARDIS felt the ache as well. And why not? There could never be another Kathryn. More friends maybe, each certainly brilliant, but not another Kathryn. She was special. She was so, so special.

She wouldn't have died if it weren't for him. She wouldn't have been made if it weren't for him. His fault, all of it.

She'd been so scared. So much pain, so much fear.

He looked at the small vial in his hand, the dust inside kept there by a simple cork. A purple crystal necklace was tightly wrapped around the neck of the round bottle.

Opening the door to a large, simple room he set the vial on a dresser next to two pictures. As he looked up he caught sight of a painting reflected in the dresser mirror. The grinning people standing the in rain brought back a flood of memories, nearly choking him.

No. He couldn't think about it.

The Doctor ran to back to the console room with a speed created by mad grief and started the engines. He had to run. He had to run.

* * *

River Song closed the worn blue journal, blinking away the tears in her eyes. She looked at the three children she cared for. One of them was Charlotte, the girl who was actually the computer that made up the Library. The children's eyes were round, each of them with trembling lips.

"She didn't really die…did she Mommy?" her son asked. River Song nodded.

"Yes, she did. But you see, the Doctor always remembered her, and now you have the story, and you can keep on remembering too."

"Did the Doctor tell you that story?" Charlotte asked. River nodded.

"Yes he did. I found her rooms once by accident and the whole thing came out of him like a flood, he'd been holding it so long."

"I like her stories," Charlotte proclaimed. "River, do you have more?"

"No I don't."

"Oh. Will you tell her stories to us again?"

River smiled. "If you wish."

"Good. I don't ever want to forget her."

River's small daughter gave a gasp. "Mommy, do you think if Charlotte looked, she could find more stories about Kathryn in the Library? She was such a person, there has to be more."

"I'm sure there is." River stood up, finishing the story time. "But for now it's time to sleep, my children. Sleep and dream of marvelous adventures, of stars and planets, and of the magnificent girl from America. Dream, and never forget."

* * *

**Fin**


End file.
